Jason Siff

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Basic Meditation Instructions
Brief Meditation Instructions
Instructions from Within Meditation and the Problem with Instructions from the Outside
Three Conditions for an Independent Meditation Practice
About Learning and Unlearning Meditation
Unlearning Meditation
The Pros and Cons of Moment-To-Moment Mindfulness Meditation
Recollective Awareness
Aspects of Receptivity
The Lay of the Land Within
The Significance of Method in Meditation Practice
Unmasking Meditation Instructions 2
Basic Meditation Instructions
The Moving and the Still
We begin by making a distinction between the moving and the still. Seated, with eyes closed, I ask you to show a preference for
the still while allowing the moving (thoughts, feelings, breathing) to continue uninterrupted. What you will readily know as the
still will initially be external physical contact, which will be felt at certain contact points. You can start with either one of these:
rear against the cushion or the floor.
Showing preference is simply the intention to prefer the stillness of the contact points while allowing your thoughts and feelings
to come, to stay, and to leave on their own. It is essentially showing preference for being with the experience of your body
sitting still, even though your mind may only be drawn into that stillness for a few seconds at a time. Even as you show
preference for the stillness of your body sitting, your thoughts and feelings may continue to occupy much of your attention, and
that is just what you are experiencing and need not be changed.
Following these instructions, you may experience lengthy periods of your mind being very active, making it difficult for you stay
with the contact points for even a few seconds. You may wonder if sitting with all this mental chatter is really meditating; I
assure you, it is. We cannot force our minds to be still, for that will just create more agitation, tension, aggression, and selfdislike. In this path of gaining greater peace and tranquility, we use peaceful means from the very beginning.
Along with the instruction to show preference for the stillness of the body as you sit, I usually suggest that people become
conscious of their expectations and ideas about meditation, and be willing to learn what it is like to sit without any goal,
objective, or purpose in mind. Just allow the meditation process itself to unfold without trying to control or judge it, though
attempts to control and judgments about what is happening will occur. There is no way to do this practice wrong, except by
constantly trying to control your meditation experience instead of letting it be just what it is. Through this approach you will
learn a natural way of being in your experience but not entirely of it, and in time you will develop a wider range of inner
experience, a capacity to tolerate whatever arises in your mind, and a more extensive awareness of the conditioned nature of
your world.
Recollecting the Meditation Sitting Afterward
In the past I would recommend recollecting meditation experiences during the meditation sitting. I have seen that this is not
such a good way to begin, as it can create a certain amount of pressure and tension to interrupt what is going on in a sitting in
order to recall what just happened. Instead, I suggest that you just allow your meditation sittings to follow their own course as
much as possible, without prescribed interference, and then recollect the meditation sitting afterwards.
After each meditation sitting, take a few moments to silently recollect what went on during the meditation sitting. Start by
recalling what is easy to recall and then try to recall other parts of the sitting which are more difficult to bring back to mind. A
good deal of each meditation sitting may be impossible to retrieve afterwards, so be satisfied with a simple recollection of what
you truly remember. Also, in the recollection, accuracy is not as important as honesty. (By that I mean accurately recalling
details is not as important as getting an honest picture of what went on.)
To aid in this process of recollection, you might want to take the time to write down what you remember of a meditation sitting
in a journal.
Brief Meditation Instructions
(transcribed from a talk)
I just want to say a few things about meditation before we begin. Some of you have already been meditating or already have a
practice and what I'd like for you to be able to do today is to let yourself be a little more allowing, a little bit more friendly to
yourself in your practice and to start to notice some of the things that have gone into your meditation practice. Because when
we learn a particular instruction, a particular way of meditating, we often keep doing it, we keep doing those instructions again
and again, and we may not see all that clearly that we've actually developed a "meditator" in our practice. That there's actually

some sense of a particular style of meditation, particular things that we expect or anticipate to happen in the sittings, even
particular judgments or views on experience which go completely unquestioned because they're so much a part of us. So, in
order to look at those a bit and to get a sense of what those are, maybe free yourself from some of them that may be a bit rigid,
is to meditate as you have been but don't feed that practice. Let it kind of go on its own and start to notice some of the things
that are going on in it.
For example, if you've had a practice of being aware of your breath you might notice that there are times when you go to your
breath because you're feeling a particular pain or emotional discomfort or certain memories come up and you go to it. Or,
you're going to it because an idea comes into your head that you should be with your breath, and so you bring your attention to
it. Start to notice a little bit more of what's gone into that practice. Not to drop it at that point, but just to see, "Well this is
what's happened; this is how meditation has developed for me." And you don't need to do it in a way where you're always on
top of your experience and trying to figure that out, but rather, just let your experience go on and every so often in the sitting
you may notice things about your meditation practice. And just keep that in mind: that you're becoming aware of that, and not
trying to control it or direct it, but just kind of let things be in the sitting.
For those of you who haven't meditated before, I'm just going to give you what I give as a basic instruction. And the way I look at
instructions is that if an instruction gets in the way, just drop it. It's not working. If an instruction is helpful, then just continue
with it. Just let yourself stay with it, and if your mind goes to doing something else, that's fine. Part of this is giving up control. So
you don't need to be controlled or directed in this. Instead, the real task is to let yourself surrender to the process that you
engage when you're in meditation.
So the basic instruction I give to people is to be aware of the contact or your hands touching your legs, or your feet touching the
cushion, or your rear touching the cushion. Just the external contact or your body sitting. And the reason for that is that it's
always there when you sit. Your attention can go to it without searching for it. When you put your attention on your foot
touching the mat, it's still there. It doesn't change. It doesn't shift. And so it's really much easier as an object for your mind to
concentrate on. When it comes to thoughts, feelings you have, don't try to suppress them or push them aside. Instead, just let
them be there. Your attention will move. So sometimes your attention will be aware of sounds. You'll be aware of your body.
You may be aware of your breath. Let yourself be flexible. And, let your attention be a little freer than you have in the past. So
this is a different beginning, a different orientation than instructions which say "just be aware of your breath," or "just be aware
of your body," or "just be aware of a mantra." Instead, it's more about letting your attention go from thing to thing and noticing
how you focus on certain things, how you do become aware of things. If you start to get drowsy and tired, let yourself feel that.
Don't try to wake yourself up. You can let yourself slouch. You can let yourself go towards sleep. If you find yourself impatient or
restless, don't try to calm yourself or stop it. Let yourself feel what it's like to be restless and a little bit agitated, whatever you
may feel in the sitting. So you start to welcome these things into your meditation sitting instead of pushing them out of your
sitting. And, in the long run that'll make it so that you'll be able to handle them and deal with them all through your meditation
practice and not try to find ways to stop them or get rid of them.
So, unless there are any questions, we'll start a sitting, and we'll sit for 30 minutes.
Instructions from within Meditation and
The Problem with Instructions from the Outside
The mind in meditation can operate under different laws than it does outside of meditation. There are many meditation
instructions which actually originate outside of meditation and therefore cannot take into account how the mind functions
within meditation. It is like someone learning English using the grammatical rules of Sanskrit or Chinese, trying to arrange words
into meaningful sentences by using logical formulae that should make sense, but instead produce nonsensical statements. As
such, these instructions appear to be logical and consistent with how we commonly view the mind, though they are full of
contradictions when applied to meditation.
The only way to test what I have to say in this article is by experimentation, which is a perfectly valid way to get to the truth
about anything.
We begin with the instruction, "be aware of the breath." Unfortunately, this instruction has to be elaborated on to be used, and
much of that elaboration has come from outside of meditation. There are many instructions that sound right for observing the
breath, and of those, the ones that involve some sort of technique (or concentration exercise) are the most hostile to the
natural functioning of our minds in meditation.
Counting the breath, for instance, meets so much resistance from our naturally roaming mind that we generally end up berating
our bad habits of thinking too much when we repeatedly fail to go from one to five and back again without a break in our
concentration. Noticing the smooth rise and fall of the abdomen as we breathe naturally, supposedly without forcing our
attention or altering our breath, rarely results in the all-too-desired sharp awareness and tranquility it is supposed to offer,
yielding up one surge after another of agitation, self-hatred, and frustration. What is prescribed in such a venerable way as a
relaxant for the mind is none other than an outsider's brilliant idea of how the beginning meditator's mind should function if
only it could be trained to conform to the instructions that are being applied.
Some of you may prefer this approach of getting your mind to do what it is "supposed to" as the focus of your meditation
practice. This activity in itself can consume much of your energy in meditation, and while not leaving room for much else, it does
create enough inner strife for you to work even harder for that precious inner peace that comes when all the thinking stops, the
gross emotions dissipate, and the smooth flow of the breath is soothing and timeless. When the mind is finally subdued, then
what? For many this becomes a memory they continue to strive to recapture over and over again through the same means of
battling the mind.
A question I asked myself when I had had enough of trying to corral and subdue my mind in meditation was, "How can the mind
become sharply aware and tranquil through peaceful means?" In asking this question, I then understood that I had not

understood meditation, in the sense that I did not believe in the possibility that the roaming mind could lead me to the still and
peaceful mind. I had taken on the belief that these were two separate and unrelated experiences of mind, one being far more
preferable than the other.
Many years down the road of meditating through primarily peaceful means (those old habits of bullying come to the fore on
occasion) have taught me a few things about instructions that arise during meditation. One thing is that meditation instructions
that come from inside meditation are not logical and do not conform to common views of how the mind works. Another thing is
that they are context-oriented and do not have universal applications.
What do I mean by instructions coming from inside of meditation? Simply that. That the meditation sittings become about being
sensitive to your present state of mind, listening to it with a compassionate and understanding ear, following its course while
allowing it to lead, and surrendering to whatever new experience it lands upon. Our minds are telling us many things when we
meditate, and not all of it is useless chatter, fantasies, daydreams, and desires. At times, while meditating, we are learning from
our meditation experience how to meditate.
These inside instructions are not logical; they are intuitive, based on being honestly aware of what you are experiencing. They
cannot be applied universally, as they only relate to particular experiences. Thus you cannot discover an instruction from within
meditation and then turn it into a technique for everyone to use. It may work once or twice or even a few more times, but then
you find yourself back again trying to follow one particular instruction, ignoring what your mind can tell you about itself in
meditation.
So I will not give you any instructions, but I will briefly outline an approach to meditation. Just sit still, comfortably. There is the
stillness of the body sitting and there is the moving of attention. Let your attention go where it will and notice when you try to
avoid your thoughts, feelings, and urges, but do nothing about it. Just sit still and let your mind be as it is. Slowly and gently, over
several sittings, cultivate a preference for the stillness of your body over the moving of your mind. A preference is not a wish,
and it certainly is not aggressive and forceful; it is allowing your mind to be filled with thoughts, lazy or indifferent, restless,
worried, and agitated, while preferring the awareness of your body sitting still. This is not about sticking with the body, or about
following the breath, but about showing preference for the still and tranquil part of your experience while allowing all of the rest
to continue uninterrupted. These are not really instructions: this is only a way to frame, to approach, the primary meditation
experience, without adding anything new to it, except for the one gentle preference.
Three Conditions for an Independent Meditation Practice
Instead of instructions (or rules) to be followed, there are three conditions influencing what one does as meditation. These three
conditions are obvious, commonplace, and concrete, so much so, I will use the words my students have repeatedly chosen for
them: gentleness, permission, and interest.
What I suggest is that instead of trying to practice all of these three conditions at the same time, you choose one to influence
your meditation sittings for the time being, and then wait and see how the other two come into play.
The one to begin with for those new to meditation is gentleness. For those with an established meditation practice, begin with
permission (but still read the section on gentleness). Those who tend to think a great deal during meditation (and outside of it)
may want to begin with interest.
Before you begin meditating, in order for this to have a reasonable chance of working for you, you need to commit yourself to
meditating in this way for at least one week (5 to 7 meditation sittings).
Gentleness
"Be gentle to yourself," I often say at the beginning of a workshop or retreat. Then I usually say something like, "In America,
most of us are self-critical. We want to do things well. But we don't treat ourselves all that well in the process."
Gentleness in meditation is about how you treat yourself. Many meditators start their meditation sittings by diving right into
doing the instructions they have been taught. They don't just bring their attention to the breath, a mantra, or visualization, but
rather force it. Behind that force is aggression, pressure, driven-ness, or just plain tension. And when things don't go well, they
tend to chastise themselves with thoughts of failure and self-doubt.
So, to start off a meditation sitting with gentleness is to not dive right into doing some kind of instruction or practice. Simply
allow a transition to occur. What you were thinking about before the meditation sitting will naturally carry on into the beginning
of the sitting. Many meditators start off a sitting by trying to stop all thoughts. Thoughts, when they arise, are then perceived as
distractions. Here is where gentleness truly starts in meditation. These thoughts coming into your sitting are not distractions, for
they are your thoughts, and most of the time outside of meditation, you are the one who owns them, acts on them, and
produces more of them. They are to be welcomed into the meditation sitting just as you would welcome a friend, a relative, or
even someone you may not particularly like into your home.
How to Begin a Meditation Sitting with Gentleness
A. Choose a comfortable posture to sit in, one that will not cause pain or create additional posture changes during the sitting.
You may sit in a chair, have back support, or lie down on your back. Whatever posture you choose, make sure it is gentle to your
body. If you have to move for some reason during the sitting, be aware of the pain, itch, or discomfort you are experiencing, and
only then decide to move, moving slowly and deliberately. When you move slowly and deliberately during a meditation sitting,
there is less likelihood that the movement will feel disruptive.
B. Choose a length of time for the meditation sitting that is easy to begin with. One hour is generally too long, while five minutes
is definitely too short. Most people find twenty or thirty minute long meditation sittings to be just right. Use a gentle sounding
alarm or glance at a watch or clock on occasion. If you become restless, anxious, or extremely bored before the end of the
sitting, allow yourself to end the sitting early. And if you would like to continue to sit behind the time you set for yourself, make
sure you have given yourself enough time between the end of the sitting and whatever you may need to do after the sitting.

C. Sit with your eyes closed, as that will enable a meditative process to form more readily (as well as bring the other senses more
into awareness). You may then bring your attention to the front of your face, your hands resting on your legs or one on top of
the other, or your legs and feet touching the cushion you are sitting on. But do not hold your attention there, and definitely do
not cut off thoughts, feelings, and sounds to return to the awareness of your body. Just have a gentle preference for your body
sitting as you allow your thoughts and feelings to be.
D. Allow your mind to transition from what you were doing and thinking about before the sitting. This transition may contain
recent memories, dialogues you just had, work you were doing, plans that you were making, lists of things to do, feelings of
resentment, hurt, and rage, as well as feelings of hope, longing, and love, to name but a few of the themes you may encounter
at any given time. You may fear that the transition will not be a transition at all, but will consume you for the entire sitting. If you
are gentle with it, with all that is going inside of you as you sit down to meditate, it is bound to change for better. But if you are
impatient with it (your thoughts and feelings) and try to stop it or do something to make it go away, you may just end up being
hard on yourself, prolonging the difficulty. Being gentle with it, if it doesn't stop it, at least makes it less of a problem, less of a
negative self-judgment.
Permission
You have permission to do the meditation practice of your choice, or, not do it.
Practically all people who are introduced to meditation are given an instruction to follow, and they follow it. Few rebel against
the instruction (or the teacher), believing that in order to get the right results from meditation they must follow a particular
instruction. This creates an atmosphere of conformity when everybody is following the same instruction (or teacher), or an
atmosphere of factionalism when students of different teachers meet in large groups.
Very few teachers truly accept all "wholesome" meditation practices as being of value. Even if they allow for people doing other
practices than what they teach, these teachers will still hold their method as the right one, or the best one. It has taken me
several years as a meditation teacher to work this problem through. I don't teach a smorgasbord of meditation techniques,
which is how several meditation teachers have resolved this issue without dealing with it. What I do instead is teach a way to
explore the various meditation practices one has done (or is doing).
To explore one's various meditation practices, one needs to do them. So students of mine have permission to do the practices
they have done. Only this time they attempt to look at those practices and see some of the habits of mind they have developed
by doing them. They also have permission not to do the practices they have done. They can do whatever is necessary for them.
And they can rebel against my approach as much as they want.
Because what happens is that the students become independent. They are not dependent on me for the "right" instruction.
Instead they form a relationship with me where we are both genuinely interested in what meditation is for them. I listen to
people meditate their own way, not my way. I help them see what they are doing in meditation, and from that they see how
skillful (or unskillful) they are at times.
The unfortunate, but necessary, consequences of independence are confusion, uncertainty, and doubt. When I hear a meditator
speak of his confusion, I hear someone who is seriously applying himself to meditation and struggling to understand his
experiences. When someone speaks of uncertainty, I hear surface certainties, convictions, and beliefs no longer having power
over him. He is ready for true self-exploration. And when I hear someone doubt about ever becoming enlightened through
meditation, I recognize someone who is beginning to see himself as he is and how far enlightenment appears to be when
someone is honest about himself.
How to Begin Meditating with Permission
A. You have permission to meditate as you have been. If you choose not to meditate in your accustomed way at any point in the
meditation sitting, you can use A through D of the previous section on gentleness.
B. Every so often in the meditation sitting (once every 5 to 10 minutes) reflect back on what you have been doing. For instance,
if you have been counting your breath, recollect how you have been doing it, what the experience has been like, and what
makes you remember (or decide) to count your breath. Sometimes on such reflection, you may not notice much of anything.
When that happens, do not force it, and just continue with the practice you are doing.
C. After the sitting is over take a few moments to recollect the meditation sitting. In your recollection bring your attention to
how you applied the instructions and what your "honest" experience of doing that practice was.
Interest
Interest, at the beginning, looks the least like itself than the other two conditions for exploration. At this stage it would be better
to call it "focused thinking" as it may appear as ordinary problem-solving, ruminating, pondering, etc. It is important to let this
kind of thinking go on, for besides there generally being quite a bit of momentum behind it, it is how our minds will eventually
become "intelligently engaged" in looking at things.
This whole area of "focused thinking" in meditation is fraught with difficulties. Practices from the East generally advocate
"transcending thinking" as opposed to thinking as being part of one's practice of inner understanding. Western traditions are
generally more sympathetic to "focused thinking", and our verb "to meditate" does mean "to ponder, to contemplate, to reflect
on."
Pondering, reflecting on, and contemplating are all forms of focused thinking, for they require some sort of concentration
(sustained focus on something). When these are turned into meditation practices, they are usually given with "objects" to be
pondered, contemplated, or reflected upon. What Eastern practices have to offer in this regard are ways to become aware of
the act (or process) of focused thinking. But what is often missing from such practices is the allowing of focused thinking about
things, from which the nature of focused thinking can be observed and studied.
Allowing one's mind to engage in focused thinking as part of the meditation sitting is thus a condition for any serious exploration
of the process of thinking, though at first it will appear more as a hindrance or impediment than as an asset. This occurs for a

variety of reasons. The most common reason is that meditation is about "meditative states" and "focused thinking" is not
generally considered to be "meditative". Such a view on thinking effectively fosters aversion to thinking, where there is no room
for gentleness. Another reason is that the experience of sitting and thinking appears to be no different than idle day-dreaming.
That is true. There may be little difference for some people between the experiences of "thinking in meditating" and daydreaming. What distinguishes these two mental activities however is that meditation is done with the intention to develop more
awareness of one's inner world while day-dreaming is done to pleasantly distract oneself. One last reason why most meditators
see focused thinking as an impediment is that it generally carries with it a "self" which one is not entirely pleased with in
meditation (but, for the most part, fine with outside of meditation). It is the "mundane self" behind the focused thoughts that
one truly wants freedom from in meditation. Only, the route to such freedom is not to be found in the aversion to thinking, for
like the many-headed Hydra, once one head is severed, two new ones grow (one is the newly reconstituted train of thought and
the other is the judgments about the self that does the thinking).
How to Begin Meditating with Interest
A. Sit, recline, or lie down in a comfortable posture. Close your eyes. Let yourself think. Don't try to think about anything; just let
your mind think about what it will.
B. During the entire sitting (15 to 30 minutes), try not to move your body or limbs. But if you have to move, do so slowly with
forethought.
C. If at any time in the sitting your thinking becomes fragmented, random, dreamy, or just less prominent, then allow those
experiences to continue (instructions for the condition of gentleness can be used here). When focused thinking returns, for
surely it will at some time, meditate with permission to do whatever you see as needed. If you need to go with the thinking, go
with it; if you need to "let go" of the thinking, let it go on and subside of its own; if you need to explore it, let yourself think
about the thinking that is going on of its own.
D. At the end of the sitting, take a few minutes to recollect what you were thinking about during the sitting. Try to get a sense of
the general themes of your thoughts (work, relationships, plans, memories, etc.) and how these themes shifted in the sitting
(from work to relationships to memories, for example). You need not write them down, unless that helps you with your
recollection. And, you need not go into any detail with your recollection; it is enough, at the beginning, to just become aware of
the general pattern of your "focused thinking" in the sitting.
About Learning and Unlearning Meditation
When we learn a meditation practice, we are often given a particular meditation instruction. We essentially learn how to do the
instruction correctly to get the intended results or arrive at the specified goal. This kind of learning often entails a strict
adherence to the meditation practice we are being taught, and requires us to adopt the beliefs and views of our teacher. It
therefore generally turns into a type of learning process that encourages conformity, compliance, and dependence. And, on
account of that, it may not be the kind of learning environment we had in our minds when we first heard of it, though it may
have given us the certainty, safety, and clarity we needed just then.
This way of learning meditation may be unavoidable. I have made every effort to develop a way of teaching meditation where
the detrimental aspects of such a process of learning are reduced to a minimum. Still, whenever meditation instructions are
given and followed, whenever a teacher is the highest authority on a student's meditation practice, and whenever a set of
concepts are taught which are held sacred and beyond question, the type of learning process described above will dominate and
inform our meditation practice. The only way I see through this is to learn meditation with the knowledge that as we continue to
meditate, we will need to look at the meditation practice we have done and begin to disentangle ourselves from the "sideeffects" or "artifacts" created by our experience of learning it.
Unlearning meditation is the way in which we take a close, honest look at our meditation practice. In practice, it does not look
radically different than learning meditation, and may even use some of the same approach to meditation, though for a slightly
different purpose and from a different vantage point. Whereas, for example, we may use conditions instead of instructions (see
article) in our meditation practice at the outset, from the vantage point of someone in an unlearning process, these will truly be
conditions and not instructions. For a beginning meditation student, they will most likely be turned into instructions.
Unlearning Meditation
What I'm going to do is present my book Unlearning Meditation. First of all, before we go into the book, I just want to say a few
things about it to give you some history on it and just a sense of what it is I'm doing. I wrote this book in 1999, and what I did
during that time was I had people meditate for several days and do journal entries of their meditation sittings and then send me
their journals. What I found in doing that was that many of the traditional ideas of what happens in meditation, or the models of
meditation that people are taught, really did not fit what people were experiencing; that there was a discrepancy between what
people were going through and what many of the books on meditation talk about as ways to meditate or meditative
experiences even. So what I did was modify my own way of looking at mediation from what I had read from people. And I had
been doing this all along, but seeing the journals made me think more deeply that we need a way of looking at meditation that's
based on what people experience. And this is a different orientation.
What I found is that many of the people were meditating and looking at their own experience; what they ended up doing was
quite naturally follow a process of unlearning rather than a process of learning new techniques or learning new meditation
practices. The way that they would develop in meditation would be to break down the various obstacles and views that came
along with the earlier meditation practice. And so their development would be truly a sense of letting go of what they originally
learned. And that's what unlearning is about. It's another kind of learning. It's really for those who have been introduced to
something and have made it so habitual, made it so much a part of themselves that they can't see it anymore. And when that
happens, when a meditation practice or almost anything you do becomes so much a part of yourself, becomes such a strong
habit, what you tend to do is just try to improve it along the same lines. You don't necessarily look at it. But once you start

looking at it, you may start to see that there are other ways to go. That you're not limited just to that one way of meditating.
And that's what I wanted to do here. And to really show that you can look at any way of meditating. It doesn't have to be my
way of meditating. It can be any school of meditation. People can do this doing Zen or Tibetan practices or Hindu practices or
Christian contemplative practices. They can look back at the practice and see what the practice is about.
What I decided to do instead of commenting on any other type of practice was to only comment on what it is I teach. Well my
hope was that people reading this, if they're other practices would apply some of what I'm doing in this book to those practices that they would see that this is a way of looking at what has developed in your practice of meditation. It's a way of reflecting on
it.
And in saying that, there are still some things in this which are going to be about learning about what meditation is. Learning
about the kinds of experiences you have, the way your mind works in meditation. And so that process is found in this unlearning.
Let's look at page 8, and I'll read this for you: "One's experience of meditation defines what meditation is. That is what I believe
and teach. Most people do not trust their own experience and insights, deferring to the views of authorities (meditation
masters) when faced with uncertainty as to whether they're meditating correctly or not. That is because meditation is primarily
taught as a technique or exercise that must be done properly in order to get the desired results. The instructions are for the
most part logical and direct in this respect: the perfectly executed instruction is synonymous with the desired goal. Thus, the
person who practices being aware in the present moment comes to believe that the goal, when reached, is that of being aware
and present all of the time. The person repeating a mantra in meditation comes to believe that the goal is a transcendent
experience of Truth and the complete absorption on the mantra. On the other hand, a person who trusts in their own
experience and insights, learning what the meditative process is by paying attention to her own meditation experiences,
whatever they are, is not going to follow a logical path and may not even have a clue as to what the goal of meditation actually
is. From my experience as a meditation teacher, that is an excellent place to begin."
The Pros and Cons of Moment-To-Moment Mindfulness Meditation
When someone becomes aware of the arising and passing away of each minuscule event at the six sense doors (eyes, ears, nose,
palate/tongue, body/skin, and mind/thought) one is at that time practicing moment-to-moment awareness meditation. As one
becomes aware of each successive moment, she is bound to become more conscious of her intentions, of each movement of her
body, of what she should or should not be doing (saying or thinking). She will be more attuned to sounds, smells, tastes, and
sights than ever before. These are some of the major advantages one might realize early on from this practice.
On the down side, this sharp, pristine awareness of each thing that occurs can produce a surprising insensitivity to subtleties of
thought and feeling. Since one's attention is not allowed to linger on anything even for a moment, subtle feelings and moods,
especially those that persist at a low level, do not emerge into the field of awareness. A meditator may be quite aware of a
sudden surge of anger, but be completely oblivious to a barely perceptible gnawing annoyance at something. In the area of
thought, a meditator may observe that a thought arose and passed away, but be insensitive as to what the thought actually was
and what feeling, if any, it may have contained.
In Vipassana, we are instructed to go from the gross to the subtle. A too heavy use of moment-to-moment awareness can keep
the meditator at the level of gross impressions and feelings, not allowing her to get to the subtler aspects, where many deep
understandings can occur.
I have listened to the experiences of several meditators who over the years have diligently practiced moment-to-moment
awareness techniques. The most common technique, being that of noting, uses prescribed words, such as "thinking, thinking" to
catch a consciousness event exactly while it occurs. Many people, including myself, who have used this technique to catch the
immediate arising of sense and mental impressions have felt frustrated by our inability to do so. For us, the awareness of things
has not been "moment-to-moment", but, instead, immediately after the fact. Nonetheless, we were aware; we just weren't fast
enough.
In contrast to moment-to-moment awareness is a form of awareness that involves recollecting, or "calling back to mind"
immediately prior experience. This form of awareness allows the mind to be and do as it pleases, giving it a long leash for its
closely watched wanderings. One learns to tolerate its meanderings, while at the same time never losing the thin, tenuous sense
of being present, alert, and aware. Here the meditator's effort is put into observing what she experiences, be it exalted states of
mind or obsessions, and, upon her awareness returning to the still presence of the body, calling back to mind the prominent
features of the periods of mind wandering. In this way, awareness is initially developed at the level in which it is truly present:
weak and after the fact. In time, the meditator finds that there are periods where she is not so much recollecting but rather
being mindful of thoughts, feelings, sensations, and sense impressions while they are occurring. Thus, gradually, moment to
moment awareness arises, sometimes remaining for whole sittings or even longer before it too vanishes, leaving the meditator
once again aware of things at some undetermined time after the fact.
It is significant that the Pali word "sati" can be broadly translated in two different ways. One is as "wakefulness of mind. or
mindfulness," while the other is "calling back to mind, recollection, memory" (especially that of sacred teachings), which is its
original meaning. In the Pali Suttas of the Buddha and his disciples, you will find both of these meanings in use, which can make
one wonder why only one definition (mindfulness) is used by mainstream Vipassana meditation. The answer to this question lies
in the tradition of Theravada Buddhist teachers interpreting the early Suttas using concepts and definitions of the later
scholastic periods of Buddhism, most particularly the concept of consciousness-moments.
The word "sati" has been attached to that concept, and has thus come to mean "the immediate direct awareness of each
moment of consciousness as it arises and passes away." What this means to those who practice moment-to-moment
mindfulness meditation is that they define awareness solely as being in the now and disregard knowledge about experience
which is not in the now, but in the mind as a recollection.

No one can truthfully come to a conclusion about the practice of moment-to-moment mindfulness meditation, or awareness
meditation that uses recollection, unless one has tried both of them. A meditation method needs to become mastered as a
practice before its value can be appreciated or denied. Adopting it as a philosophy because it sounds good or because someone
who is an authority says it is the best or only way to meditate is inadequate. The discerning meditator will diligently try out the
approach and see where it leads.
Recollective Awareness
Coming up with the right kind of language to talk about this approach to meditation has been very difficult. What seems to have
happened is that I've made a slight breakthrough in the last few months. It helped putting out Unlearning Meditation and
making it more available to the public. But Unlearning Meditation, which is something that I've been giving talks on for a couple
of years now, is really about how to break the habits of mind in meditation. But that's not what I teach necessarily. That's one
aspect of it. But what I feel I'm teaching is something of a broader nature and a particular way or style of meditating. And I've
decided to call it "Recollective Awareness Meditation." And the reason for that is the kind of awareness that is involved comes
about through recollection, through recalling things in your sittings, through an act of calling back to mind or looking back upon
your experiences. And the recollection in itself is a form of awareness, is a form of becoming conscious of what happens when
you meditate.
The initial instructions seem to be very loose and relaxed and you just let things happen, go with what you're experiencing.
Showing preference for the body as a form of structure, as having a base. But you're not really trying to change or manipulate or
direct or guide or do anything with your experience. You're letting the flow of the meditative process develop naturally. But if
that was the only thing that you would be doing in meditation, you would find that you're really not getting that much more
aware. You may be getting a little more tranquil. You may be getting in touch with deeper feelings, with certain states of mind
you might not normally get in touch with. But it doesn't necessarily increase your awareness of the meditative experience. It
doesn't produce the kind of awareness that Buddha recommends for one who wants to develop on the path to wisdom.
What I have seen is that people who've tried to use moment-to-moment awareness, which is how awareness is most commonly
taught, tend to try to force themselves to be in the present moment and try to just maintain a certain stance on their experience
where they are either noting it, giving it a label as "feeling feeling" or "thinking thinking" or "hearing hearing," or they're just
trying to be in the "now" and that's the only part of the experience they tend to value. Whenever they're in the present moment
or at a moment-to-moment awareness of experience, that's when they think they're meditating. Everything else, when the mind
wanders, when something else happens, they think, "That's not meditation, that's 'mind wandering,' that's 'chattering,' that's
getting away from the subject of meditation or the object of meditation."
Recollective awareness can occur very close to the event. I wouldn't suggest using noting, but I would say that noting can be a
form of that. That is, you're recalling something that just happened. You're becoming conscious of something that just
happened. With the practice of noting, if you try to keep on top of your experience in that way, there's not going to be any flow
to it. Instead, it's going to be very choppy and you're always going to be noting what you're experiencing. That's what you'd be
doing. You'd be developing a kind of commentator, a second voice that would become your meditator. And that's what often
happens with noting practices or trying to be in the present moment. They actually generate something else.
With recollective awareness you're not developing a commentator or another voice. You're letting your experience go on, and
every so often in the sitting you may find that you become conscious of where you were. You're caught in a scenario about what
you're going to say to somebody when you see that person tomorrow and you may be far along in the scenario and have said
quite a bit when you finally realize, "Oh, I've been talking to this person in my mind for the last minute or two." And, at that
point you would know what you were experiencing. It's a form of recollection. You might reflect back a little with a little bit of
effort and recall what you were talking about, the themes, or if you saw the person's face that you were talking to, or you might
recall something about the experience you just had and then drop it and then continue. And what that will do is it will not
artificially disrupt the flow of your experience. Not like noting will, not like trying to be in the present moment will. Instead you
find that you will naturally kind of come out of a scenario or something your mind is involved in and you look back, maybe for a
few seconds, and then you may find that you go on.
And that's for thoughts and feelings and for what people consider to be mind wanderings. For of other types of experiences,
such as when you're aware of your breath, you're aware of just sounds or just your body, or you're sitting in a very calm state
with not too many thoughts, you may find that there's no need to recall. You're in a way naturally with your experience. You're
knowing it in some way. You may not be able to put it into words. You may not be able to lodge it directly in your memory, but
you are with it in a way. And you can just allow yourself to continue, to kind of just stay with what's going on and trust that,
even if you're not in a fully conscious or not ideally in a wakeful state, you're still with your experience. You're still connected
with what is going on.
And then after the sitting comes the most important aspect or most important act of recollection. And I would say that after
your sitting when it comes to reporting or journal writing, what is going on is that you have stepped outside of the meditative
process. You're no longer meditating. So any thoughts or reflections don't necessarily bring you back into a meditative state or
meditative process. Instead those reflections make you more conscious of what happened when you meditated. It is very similar
to recalling dreams, of keeping a dream journal. When you write down your dreams in the morning, you don't necessarily go
back into dreaming. And you may find that some of the states of mind or some of the impressions and feelings you had while
you were dreaming are very tenuous. They're fleeting, they're hard to get at. And you may find the exact same thing with
meditation. That you don't quite have the language for it or you don't quite, you're not quite able to hold what that experience
was. But it's enough that you know it. That you've reflected back and you know that you went through something that tenuous,
that vague, that hard to grasp. That increases your awareness.

Now, if you were just going on, if you decided not to recollect, what's generally going to happen in your meditation practice is
you're going to move from sitting to sitting and move from sitting and going out and taking care of your business and talking to
people and getting involved in things, and you're not going to really have a sense of knowing some of the things that went on in
the sitting. A few highlights will stick in your mind or a general mood or a general feeling may stay with you. But as far as really
getting a sense of what goes on in your meditation sitting, that part will be lost. And the thing that seems to happen - it's like
dreams - if you don't write down a dream sometimes, if you don't mull it over, after 2 or 3 days, it doesn't really exist anymore.
You've completely forgotten it. What will happen then with the recollecting is you find that the sittings that you've remembered
and recalled, when you have similar sittings, you're usually more awake, you're more attuned to what is happening. There's a
certain familiarity. A sense of "I've been here before. I've been through this before." You may not have put it into words, but
there is a strong sense that you know what this state of mind is. You know some of the patterns. You know kind of where it goes.
You may not be able to predict it or anything like that, but you can get a sense of being more conscious of it than you would be
otherwise.
Aspects of Receptivity
(transcribed from a talk)
People usually understand effort as doing something, as holding to a task and keeping up something. Receptivity is different
than effort, though it requires a certain kind of effort. Being receptive is about surrendering to what comes up. It has to do with
letting things in your experience come up and inform what you're going through.
If you are receptive during the day you might find that you're thinking about all sorts of things. Your mind is wandering and
you're going all over the place. In the same way, in meditation, when your mind is open and receptive to whatever comes up
you may have feelings or memories come up that you don't particularly want; you may find that you're aware of certain things in
your body that normally you'd block out.
With receptivity we often encounter resistance to our experience. We start to notice at first that we're not quite comfortable
with what we're doing or with what's happening inside of us. Our discomfort with experience gets very strong and we want to
do something about it.
So along with receptivity and resistance to what's going on there comes the question of tolerance. What is your level of
tolerance, your real ability to tolerate yourself and to tolerate these different kinds of experiences? Whenever you reach points
in meditation when you want to do something about discomfort you'll have a choice to make: Whether to continue to allow
things to be as they are and to stay with the experience or to do something about it.
If it's a physical experience, pain or something that can be corrected by moving your posture, then you can do that. Don't worry
about that. When it's more emotional, though, that's a different story. You might begin to wonder, "Do I really need to do
something about this anxiety that's come up, or this sadness or this fear or this rage? Or can I sit with it?"
After you decide to sit with something you may notice that it gets stronger and stronger and you may feel, "That's it, I'm going to
do something." You might decide to shift your attention away from that, to bring your attention to your body, or breath or
sounds or to being kind to yourself around the rage. You might decide to generate something around the experience to make it
more soothing and comfortable for you.
But if you do that I suggest you only do that for a little while and that you don't let it go on for the whole sitting or even for
several minutes. Do it for enough time that it allows you to tolerate the experience or the experience shifts and changes for you.
Then go back to staying with whatever comes up.
In this way, being receptive will help you build more tolerance towards uncomfortable experiences. The idea is not to get rid of
these experiences. The idea is actually to see what they're like, to go through them, to see if your relationship with these
experiences changes. See if you can start to have experiences where you're having more anxiety. You may find there are places
where you're able to look at it, or you're able to disengage from it in a certain way - not intentionally, but that your mind is
capable of doing that.
That's another thing about the receptive process: It's not about what you can do by intention, what you can do by telling
yourself now I'm going to do this or now I'm going to do that. It's more about what your mind does naturally. We do adapt
ourselves to working with particular types of experience. And you can trust that process, that it's a human process, that it's not
something that is all that mysterious.
Along these lines, when your mind is going all over the place, perhaps for several minutes, and if you reach a point where you
can no longer tolerate it, on occasion what can do is perhaps to say, "I'll just bring my attention to my body, I'll just be aware of
sounds, I'll just do that for a few seconds," and then let your attention go back to where it wants to go.
In that way, you're not developing ill will towards your thoughts. You're not deciding that you're always going to banish your
thoughts. You're not in some kind of adversarial relationship with your thinking. Instead you may find that you're able to have a
more balanced approach to your thinking.
You know your thinking goes on. It has a certain momentum, a certain force to it and that it's all right. It's all right to think in
meditation, it's all right to have that kind of process go on. But over time, you may find, as you let it go on, you will start to be
able to notice things about your thinking.
This is part of receptivity. At first it may be a bit painful and uncomfortable to find yourself so submerged in your thinking
process. Then you might find after a while that you're no longer as submerged as you were before. You're just being patient with
it and tolerant of it as you've started to shift your relationship to your thinking. This does require a certain degree of patience,
perseverance and trust in the fact that your mind will eventually settle down or you will eventually start to get some
perspective. You start to see what it is that you do.

Sometimes even when you're having a lot of thinking, you may find that there are moments where you pop up out of it and you
notice, "Oh, I've been thinking about this." That's just enough at times, just for you to have little glimmers of what you've been
going through in the thought process. You don't need to have the thinking go away.
You may also find that when your thinking dies down naturally, it doesn't seem to come back in the same way. Being receptive in
this manner, you might find that when your thinking dies down, you're more or less aware of bodily sensations or feelings or
sounds or your breath, whatever it is that starts to come into your awareness. That experience is what you're experiencing now.
You don't need then to go back to a particular theme or something you were working on. You don't then need to look at your
thoughts or feelings that you were just having. You can just let yourself continue and go on from there.
What this will help you with is to develop greater flexibility. As people we tend be rigid. Our minds want things to be a certain
way and to stay a certain way. So even when there's a shift to something that's a bit more pleasant, we may want to go back to
what we had before. Maybe the themes or the things you were thinking about went into an experience that wasn't all that
pleasant, except that it actually felt quite juicy. So of course you want to go back there. You might notice what that pull is to go
back into something that really you've already passed through.
At the end, when you write down the meditation sitting, you find you can go back, you can pick up a bit of what happened. In
that kind of recollection, you're not only picking up what happened, but you're also picking up where you went to after that and
then after that and then after that. So you're getting a different picture of what that experience is than you would inside the
sitting if you'd tried to continually bring your attention back to what you were thinking about or working with before.
Recollection also serves the ability to drop things and move on. And it serves this type of flexibility.
The Lay of the Land Within
In a fictional piece I am currently working on, two of the characters are taking a journey through a dense jungle. One of the
characters is new to the jungle, while the other is his guide. The guide uses a variety of means to determine whether they are
following the right path, and some of those means, such as climbing trees atop hills to see the lay of the land, create a sense of
uncertainty, of being hopelessly lost, to the one who is new to this jungle. Finally, after feeling anxious about whether he will get
to the destination or not, this character asks the guide if he really does know the way. The guide's response is: "In the jungle,
paths get overgrown in a matter of days. You must then rely on landmarks and what you can remember from previous
journeys." The same is often true of our meditation sittings: the paths get overgrown and we feel lost until we have cleared
away some of the obscurations and found a familiar, onward leading path again.
The meditation teachings most people are exposed to deal with "clearing away obscurations," giving the meditator tools to
handle hindrances in skillful ways. Awareness of breathing, moment-to-moment awareness of the senses, body scanning, metta
practice, to name only the most common vipassana-samatha practices, are employed as skillful means to get beyond the
hindrances to meditation and arrive at purified states of mind. These hindrances, when one is completely immersed in them, are
like a vast jungle with no trails through it. A person may feel that there is no way to break away from any of the five hindrances
(sense desire, ill-will, restlessness, laziness, and doubt) except by staying with what they have found to be the path that works
for them.
Finding the various paths that lead to purification of mind is what "vipassana" and "samatha" meditation is all about. Some
meditators may state their quest for purification of mind as finding the right teacher, the right school of Buddhism, the right
practice, or the right ideas for them. Others may say that all paths lead to the same place and there is no one practice or
teaching that is better than the others. And here we may find the two extremes of there being only one path, on the one hand,
and the validation of all paths as leading to the same goal, on the other hand.
I look at this from outside these two extremes. The question that I consider important here is this: What happens within the
consciousness of someone who follows a particular path (or meditation instructions)? One might suppose that by answering this
question, it can be concluded that either there is one path to a particular goal or many paths. In actual practice however, what
becomes understood is not the goal, but the path one is on. This shift of focus, from the goal to the path, is by no means
something new; what makes it different here is that in order to look honestly and clearly at the path, the goal needs to be taken
out of the picture, for by including it at this point in our understanding of the meditative process, we put our vision on that
which is not present and tend to misread what is.
Each meditation instruction a person uses sets up a particular process. If we imagine consciousness to be like a flowing river, the
effect of following an instruction in meditation is to divert that flow in another direction. What we want to do, however, is not
divert the river's course but purify the water in it. And we are continually in this position of diverting the flow of our individual
consciousness and trying to purify it at the same. These are two different types of activity, both of which make up the meditative
process. For example, a person who meditates observing the in-breath and the out-breath, steers the flow of consciousness to
focus more heavily on that activity, and thus pulls it away from going with the flow of thoughts, and at times during this the
mind becomes purified as it has moments of being only aware of each breath. The meditative process is "determined" by the
instruction of bringing one's attention back to the breath and by those moments of mental purification that occur when one's
attention is focused solely on the breath.
Views or beliefs pertaining to the true nature of things can also operate like meditation instructions, and thus become ways in
which one tries to be. This is what we often do to influence consciousness to make it be other than what it is. Experiences of
mental purification can come about through this influence, though they more often arise through less predictable means.
Purification is more a result of the meditative process moving in a good direction, where more wholesome states of mind arise
effortlessly, than it is a product of following a particular set of instructions or holding certain kinds of views. In fact, one
interesting thing in all of this, which I believe most any experienced meditator can testify to, is that similar purifying experiences
occur from following completely different instructions. Zen, Tantra, and Vipassana meditation practices can all lead to a host of

similar, transformative states of mind, sometimes through completely different (and occasionally contradictory) instructions and
beliefs.
I realize that the example above is a more or less ideal scenario, for the meditative process includes a third element, one that is
often excluded from realm of meditation, but is found there much of time, which is none other than "oneself." Everyone who
meditates has periods of planning, day-dreaming, worrying, scheming, revenge-taking, lusting after things, problem solving,
contemplating existence, dozing off, getting upset, feeling sad, wanting something to change, wondering if this is going
anywhere or not, -- the list is endless. These are the kinds of things our minds latch onto in meditation which are as fully a part
of the meditative process as the instructions and the purification of mind. To exclude "oneself" from the meditative process
would be to throw out much of what actually goes on in meditation.
Thus when we look at the question of what happens within the consciousness of someone who follows a particular path, we
take into account the instructions one follows, the experiences of mental purification, and the various things our minds latch
onto ("oneself"). These three elements of the meditative process are not the sum total of what goes on in our meditation
sittings, as I am sure that more elements of the meditative process could be found as well. But this is not a scientific
investigation in meditation; it is only a way for a meditator to become more aware of his/her own unique meditative process. By
becoming aware of how instructions influence one's sittings, one not only understands the nature and intent of those
instructions, but also important things about oneself. In becoming more aware of a variety of purified states of mind, such states
of mind can then be cultivated and practiced. And when one is more aware of oneself in meditation, it becomes possible to
learn from negative states of mind, how to not get overwhelmed and dominated by them, and how they come to be and are
able to flourish in the first place.
Now back to the feeling of being lost in the jungle. When the paths are overgrown, how do we find our way? We are having
meditation sittings filled with obscurations and when we apply an instruction, it does not lead to a purified state of mind. Worse
yet, our attempts at clearing a path don't reveal any hidden paths, but rather only more jungle. The process just can't be about
instructions, purified states of mind, and "oneself." Here is where the knowledge of previous journeys, and the landmarks found
on those journeys, comes in handy. There has to a consciousness of the process, not in the present moment, but over time, from
having known the lay of the land within, that helps us clear away the right obscurations at that time, opening up a familiar (or,
sometimes, newly discovered) path towards mental purification.
Learning the lay of the land within requires reflecting back on one's meditation sittings. Awareness in the present moment is
always a plus here, but sometimes the practice of always being in the present moment becomes so much about letting go of the
past that many things get forgotten in one's meditations. Reflecting back on each sitting afterwards, or for a moment during it,
can bring back to awareness things that otherwise would have been completely forgotten. Forgetting about totally unproductive
trains of thought and negative emotional states may seem like a very good outcome from a meditation sitting; but what about
forgetting how tranquility came about in the sitting, or not remembering a particular understanding one arrived at which
produced an instant of mental clarity? For these are the "landmarks" which we need to know about to continue arriving at
purified states of mind. When we don't recall these landmarks, we may not recognize them as such in future sittings.
A "landmark" in a meditation sitting can be almost anything. It doesn't have to be some deep meditative state, and, for the most
part, it never is. Just as with someone trying to find his way through the jungle, losing the path momentarily, will look for what
he recognizes as being near, or in the direction of, the path. For him, a landmark may be a large tree, a boulder, a stream. For
example, in our meditation sittings, when we are bound up with planning something we will do later, we may remember how
we had a sitting with similar planning going on and what our mind did that diminished it. We may recall that we knew a
particular feeling associated with the planning, and that perception lead to its decrease. Or we may recall having seen an image
of the planned situation, and in our mind holding that image for a moment, the planning thoughts dissipated. There are many
possible landmarks one can remember that cut through a particular hindrance and leave the mind serene. And the serenity is as
much a landmark as that which leads to it, for it provides a sense of certainty that one has once again found the path through
the jungle.
The Significance of Method in Meditation Practice
(This article was originally published in the March May 2008 edition of the Sydney Insight Meditators Newsletter.)
Much of the literature on meditation practice is concerned with the application of certain methods of meditation and how they
achieve beneficial results. An accepted meditation method is often held as beyond reproach, as if it is somehow perfect, and yet
each and every meditation practice that has ever been devised has its blind spots, its inconsistencies, its superstitions and rules,
its unfounded metaphysical beliefs and theories. However, because it is said to achieve certain results, or changes in people,
these other aspects may go unexamined.
People are introduced to methods of meditation in a variety of ways, including books, articles, talks, workshops, retreats, and
conversations with friends. Sometimes people make up their own methods, but usually the method of meditation one uses for
an extended period of time comes from teachers of authority within various traditions.
When one walks into a meditation class, one is most likely going to be introduced to a method of meditation, which these days
is almost always a practice of being aware of the breath. The environment is supportive of one doing the meditation method
that is being advocated. Generally in such situations people are polite and compliant, though they may have some doubts and
judgments flash through their minds on occasion. They feel it is a time to try something new, something that would be good for
one to do, and it is not a time to be disagreeable and resistant.
The meditation sitting begins and everyone in the room is supposedly following the same instruction. But are they doing it the
same way? Some people are trying to hold their attention on the breath and pushing away their thoughts. Others are getting
caught up in thoughts and are constantly reminding themselves to return to the breath. Others are changing the way they
breathe so as to make it easier to be aware of the breath, while others are too acutely aware of each breath and are in a state of

panic about how their breathing is going. There are several other scenarios that I could mention, but I think you get the picture.
Each individual is having her own experience of doing that particular instruction.
People having different experiences following the same type of instruction is not a novel understanding of what goes on in
meditation, and many experienced meditation teachers do take that into account. What is generally not taken into account is
how individuals apply the same method differently. What needs to be called into question here is the assumption that because
everyone got the same instruction they are all essentially doing the same thing
An individual sits down to meditate. What is she going to do? Most likely she will use a method she has heard from a teacher or
read in a book. The instruction is followed in the way she understands it. On the surface it appears that she is sitting doing a
meditation practice by following a particular instruction. So, say for example, she is trying to follow her breath at her nostrils,
noting each inhalation and exhalation. Observing her breath at the nostrils and noticing it in that way is the method. The
assumption would then be that what is going on in her meditation is that she is observing her breath because she is following
that instruction.
This assumes that what goes on in meditation is the meditation practice one has intended to do. Why would that be the case?
There is no reason to assume that just by having the intention to notice her breath that she would then sit and only notice her
breath. Knowing the human mind, it would make more sense to assume that she would not be aware of her breath much of the
time and would be thinking about all sorts of things during her meditation sitting. Her meditation sitting would mostly be made
up of her individual thoughts, feelings, desires, tendencies, memories, etc. and not about the method of meditation she has
adopted for the time being. In fact, the chosen method of meditation would have to yield to her individual temperament and
inclinations, and would, by necessity, be tempered and altered by how she does it. For instance, she might find that being aware
of the breath at the nostrils is too hard to feel, and so she may shift her attention to being aware of her lungs filling with air and
expelling it, or her diaphragm moving up and down as she breathes. Someone with a different temperament might also find that
the whole process of trying to observe her breath produces too much anxiety or frustration and so gives up on the idea; and still
another might find that it is easy to stay with the breath, but still thoughts keep taking her attention from it.
The most one could say then about the relationship of one's chosen method of meditation and one's experience of doing it is
that it is customized. It may change from one sitting to another, or from one period of time to another, but not because the
method changes, but rather because each of us adapts any given method to our own temperaments and moods. In strict schools
of meditation practice, such natural adaptation is frowned upon, for there is a belief in a pure method; and in those schools of
practice, the students tend to believe that there is an absolutely right way of doing that particular meditation practice and that
any other way is wrong. In this respect, the separation of a method from the person doing it is, by its very definition, an
abstraction. A pure method is thus an ideal far removed from what is found in actual experience.
How do people take in meditation instructions? What are some of the different ways in which people use such instructions?
Let's start with one common way people take in instructions. First, there are those who try to follow them as stated, but also
want to excel at following them. The attitude of following instructions to the letter and getting the most out of them is prevalent
among many meditation practitioners. Such individuals will most likely push themselves to stick with the instruction and get it
right at all costs, no matter how long it takes, or how much effort it involves. And when they feel they are doing it right, they are
often filled with doubt; are they really doing it right? What if their teacher says they are not doing it right?
Another way some people take in instructions is to believe that they can't possibly get the instruction right, but will try anyhow.
The instruction to just be aware of the breath sounds like an impossible feat for them, though they can perhaps imagine it
happening. They follow the instruction with a pending sense of failure, convinced that they are not up to the task. So while that
is their meditation method, they are in fact not using that method, but doing something else altogether.
In addition, there are those who may find themselves somewhere in between these two extremes, who follow an instruction
exclusively and faithfully at times, while at other times decide to do something else, and so may not feel compelled to succeed
or destined to fail at any one method. Thus there is a provisional way that such people may take in instructions, where when
first introduced they wholeheartedly try to follow the instruction, but then, after a while, they include that instruction in their
repertoire of meditation practices.
The Method of Recollective Awareness Meditation
For a beginning student of meditation, recollective awareness meditation is taught as a method, though it is a flexible method.
The initial instruction is to be aware of the external contact of the touch of the hands, one on top of the other in one's lap, or
the contact of one's feet, legs, or rear touching the seat or cushion, while allowing one's thoughts and feelings to be as they are.
In the course of a meditation sitting, it is all right to be caught up in thoughts, feelings, memories, plans, or anything that draws
one's attention. At times one can gently bring one's attention back to the contact of one's hands or of one's body sitting on the
cushion, but one need not keep one's attention there, rather one can allow one's mind to be drawn back into thoughts if that is
what is happening. So, in contrast to standard meditation practices of, say, observing the breath, one does not try to keep one's
attention in one place, nor does one stop one's thoughts.
Since thinking is included in the meditation sitting, meditating with thoughts is acceptable. This makes a big difference as to how
someone will experience the method. There will be less concern about whether one is doing it right or wrong, as it is not clear
what success or failure is in this method. What will come up more frequently are doubts as to whether this is meditation. But
that is OK, and even desirable, as from the outset the method one is using is up for critical examination. So even at the beginning
of learning this form of meditation, the student is not required to be compliant and only follow the instructions given. In fact, a
student can ignore the beginning instructions altogether and do some other kind of practice and still benefit from this approach.
The reason for this benefit is the next step in this approach, which is to recollect what happens in each meditation sitting; hence
the name. The instruction is to recollect the sitting after it is over. After the sitting ends, the student takes a couple of minutes to
reflect back over the sitting and see what she remembers about it. This need not be done sequentially, but rather beginning with

what one remembers best about the sitting. From remembering a few things that happened in the sitting, it follows that some
more of the meditation sitting will come to mind. One does not need to force oneself to remember most of what went on in the
meditation sitting; whatever one remembers is enough to begin two additional steps in this approach: the reporting or
journaling process.
Journaling or reporting one's meditation sitting to another is optional after each sitting, but at some time a student of this
approach will have to talk to a teacher and/or keep a journal of her meditation sittings. There are several reasons for this, but
the main one is that the teaching of meditation is done through what the student experiences and through bringing what goes
on in meditation more clearly into the student's awareness, rather than giving the student meditation instructions. The only
meditation instructions in this approach are the initial instructions. Thereafter, all guidance comes out of the student's
recollections, and thus is highly individualized and contextualized within the student's ongoing self-exploration and practice of
the Dharma.
In this approach to meditation, students walk into a meditation class and receive the initial instruction given earlier, as well as
instruction for those who already have a meditation practice or have done different types of meditation. For people who have
meditated before, the opening instruction is to do the practice one has been doing. No one is required to change his or her way
of meditating, though everyone is asked to be willing and open to explore their current meditation practice. People are given
permission not to do that practice, and invited to try the beginning instructions or do some other meditation practice that they
have wanted to try. So, basically, it comes down to people being able to do whatever they like during their meditation sittings
with the condition that they will recollect and perhaps then notice things about their meditation practice.
They are given three additional suggestions. One is to be gentle with their experience, whatever they are experiencing. The
second is to allow thinking into their meditation sittings. Lastly, they are encouraged to let their minds drift towards sleep and
are permitted to fall asleep during the meditation period.
Many people trying out this method encounter more thinking at the beginning of the sitting, and often wonder if this is
meditation. But because thinking is being allowed, there is less conflict about it, less self-judgment over having thoughts, and
fewer attempts to stop thinking or slow it down or divert it. The thinking usually quiets down on its own after a while when
accepted in this way, and, if it doesn't, it is not a failure, but rather something that one could become interested in. For instance,
instead of being merely swept along in what one is planning to do after the meditation class, one might find one's attention
shifting to becoming interested in how such plans pull one along, and what it is that is so engrossing about them.
As in any meditation method, one may think one is not doing it right even though there is no single right way to do it. In this
approach one would then become more aware of one's need to find a right way to do things. In a similar vein, if one feels unable
to do this form of meditation, then that obstruction to meditating, being one's feelings of inadequacy, becomes something one
experiences and brings into greater awareness through the meditation practice. Thus instead of defining one's self as someone
who cannot do this practice, as could happen with methods that have a definite set of instructions to follow all the time, one is
doing this practice by experiencing and looking into the thoughts and feelings of not being able to do this practice.
To clearly define this approach to meditation, at some point or another a student may be instructed to be completely receptive
to their experience in meditation and not to do anything to change it. It will then seem as though the right way of meditating is
to be completely passive and accepting of all experience, and that whenever one decides to direct one's attention or do a
particular practice, one is no longer following this approach. It is just as easy to become rigid about this approach as any other.
But this approach is extremely flexible. One can do most any of the various meditation practices, but not as a technique. Instead
of deciding to be aware of the breath in a certain manner, which would be a technique, one becomes aware of the breath when
one's attention is naturally drawn to it. Thus one is first aware of the breath before deciding to fix one's attention on it, which
makes it easier to stay with the breath, since one's attention is most likely not being pulled away from it by thoughts. One's
attention may only stay with the breath for a short while before moving onto something else, but in that short while one would
have effortlessly been with the breath and would have experienced what it is like to be with the breath. In doing so, one would
experience the benefits of observing the breath without using a technique of constantly bringing one's attention back to it.
As I mentioned earlier, one aspect of this approach is the opportunity to report ones sitting. Therefore meditation students who
practice this approach sometimes feel as though they have to remember their sittings in detail. So one side-effect of this
approach is going over one's sitting during the sitting, trying to recall each and every little thing that happened. In going over the
sitting, one might begin telling the teacher or a friend about what one was experiencing. If this happens on occasion, it is not a
problem, and may even be useful; but if it happens to excess, it might be best to stop reporting or journaling afterwards and see
if that cuts down the amount of time spent retelling one's experiences during the sitting.
All meditation methods produce benefits, as well as problems and side effects. The fact that a meditation practice is beneficial
for a period of time or creates problems for one does not mean that it is the right or wrong practice for someone. The way one
meditates may undergo several changes over the course of many years of practice, and part of the skill in meditating is
recognizing when a particular technique or style of meditation is no longer working the way it once did. These methods are
merely helping us become aware, wise, and compassionate, and we may go through many of them on our journey towards
liberation of mind.
Unmasking Meditation Instructions
The key to understanding meditation instructions lies in the fact that they lay the foundation for one's experience of meditation.
The instructions inform how one begins a meditation sitting, what one will do in the sitting, and what direction the sitting should
go in. Behind those meditation instructions are three basic principles:

In following meditation instructions, one does not learn how to meditate, but rather one learns a set of rules and how to apply
them to meditation practice.
To give you an idea of what I mean by rules, I will list two of the most common rules:
always stay with the meditation instruction one is practicing.
). Not
doing the instruction perfectly leads to failure.
Let's take a common meditation instruction as an example. A person is instructed to be aware of the breath at the nostrils. He is
simply told: Be aware of each and every in-breath and out-breath at the nostrils. Do that for twenty minutes. He sits down and
brings his attention to the nostrils, but before long he is thinking about things. He stops his thoughts so that he can become
aware of his breath. A breath or two later he starts thinking again, and so brings his attention back to his breath. Without even
realizing it, he has just set up a rule, which he will follow for the rest of meditation sitting: When my attention wanders from the
breath, I must always bring it back to the breath. Wandering from the breath becomes prohibited. One might go as far to say,
after meditating with such a rule, that when one's attention is not on the breath, one is not meditating. Sure enough, after
several sittings of defining meditation as having one's attention only on the breath, such a meditator will have developed an
elaborate set of rules that govern his meditation practice. He will have rules regarding changing or modifying his breathing
rhythm, when it is acceptable and when it is not; rules concerning his body posture, bodily movements in the meditation sitting,
and which bodily sensations can be focused on and which cannot; and rules as what might be a permissible distraction from the
breath and how long such a distraction should be permitted to last. This last set of rules, regarding permissible distractions, may
only be made if the practice of being aware of the breath is supposed to lead to something else, such as a vision or blissful state
of consciousness, or if the awareness of breathing practice is taught to include other sense experience, such as sounds, bodily
sensations, etc.
Along with rules, meditation instructions include acceptable rule-breakers. These are generally strategies that are employed in
the service of the instructions. When, for example, one is having difficulty staying with the in and out breath in meditation, one
may break the rule of always being with the breath to employ a strategy to make being with the breath easier. A strategy can
take many forms, and is the most common type of advanced meditation instruction given to meditators.
Flip through almost any book on meditation and you will find many a helpful strategy. Most of the strategies are given in the
service of getting back to doing the instruction with renewed vigor and greater discipline. In the example above, a meditation
student who is having difficulty staying with the breath for even a few seconds in a meditation sitting may benefit from a
strategy, which, at first, breaks the rule of his sitting practice. He may then be given the instruction to bring his attention to his
whole body sitting and begin to observe his breath from that vantage point, instead of keeping his attention firmly on his breath
at the nostrils. Once this kind of strategy works however, the rules around meditating correctly go back into place, and one
returns to one's core meditation practice. That is, the strategy rarely ever becomes the beginning of a new kind of meditation
practice for the student.
Concepts Embedded in Instructions
This is a phenomenon that I became much more aware of when I began teaching meditation than when I was a student. As a
student, I would just do the instruction diligently, thinking that the instruction was helping me see things the way they truly are.
When I was observing my breath, for instance, I believed that the instruction to notice the rise and fall of my abdomen was
getting me to see the fundamental truth of rising or falling, or as my teachers put it, the arising and passing away of phenomena.
I didn't realize it until I heard it from students I was teaching, that this was just a concept embedded in the instruction. What is
going on when this happens is that one is seeing the experience through a particular lens, a specific view on the nature of one's
experience which is to be known, confirmed, and verified by following that particular instruction.
Other concepts that are embedded in instructions: being aware of each breath is being in the present moment; moving
sensations up and down your body (body scanning) is purifying your mind and producing wisdom; and staying with the mantra is
being with the true transcendent reality and eliminates the grasping ego. These concepts are not just tagged onto the
instruction as an afterthought, but are as much a part of the instruction as the rules inherent in the instruction. One reason
perhaps why people are reluctant to break the rules in instructions is that if they do, the promise of realizing the concept
embedded in them may not come to pass. It would be as if by deciding to drop the practice of staying with the breath as the
primary object of meditation, one would never find a way to be in the present moment or know how things arise and pass away.
This makes me think that perhaps for some meditators the rightness of the instruction may come from perceived rightness of
the concept embedded in it. The thinking goes like this: If I believe in this particular concept, say that being in the present
moment is ultimate reality and the highest truth, then I will learn an instruction that will lead me to being in the present
moment all the time. The idea, or promise of the idea, basically sells the meditation instruction.
Then there are concepts that operate as instructions on their own: just let go, do not cling to anything, be in the present
moment, accept all that comes, be equanimous, love yourself, empty your mind, and a host of others. Some meditators may sit
down to meditate and believe that they are not meditating with any instructions. They are just going to sit and let go of things,
or empty their minds, or accept all that comes, instead of observing their breath or reciting a mantra or doing any such taskoriented instruction.
What makes these meditation practices conceptual is that they start with an idea as to what being in the present moment is, for
example, and not from someone's experience of being in the present moment. Some students may be given the idea that being
in the present moment means that there is no past and no future, that the true reality is only in the present. This makes sense
intellectually, and this understanding of the concept is then used to as a guide to correctly meditating in the present moment,

which often then entails stopping one's attention from pursuing thoughts that go into the past or into the future. Other
techniques might be used along with this concept of the present moment, such as a practice of observing one's breath, to help
keep the student in the present and re-enforce the idea that being in the present is the only true reality.
Concepts are thus embedded in meditation instructions in two ways. One is that the instruction is given in order to understand a
particular idea (have a specific realization or insight), as in observing the breath so as to understand how things arise and pass
away. The other way is that of an idea being taught for the purpose of one realizing it in one's meditation experience, as in being
present to one's experience so as to be in the Now.
Is it possible for people to meditate without embedded concepts? That is a question I will try to examine in other articles. But,
for the moment, I would have to say that any meditation practice someone picks up has embedded concepts, just as it has rules
to meditate by and ideal scenarios attached to it.
Ideal Scenarios
People have ideals regarding meditative experience when they talk about an experience they have not had. For beginning
meditators that is often just the way it is; they have only the mental pictures and ideas about meditative experiences and may
be meditating in order to have those experiences for themselves. But those experiences have to fit the idea they have of those
experiences for them to be legitimate. What if the actual experiences are different from the idea one has of them? Then isn't
one just pursuing a fantasy?
Few, if any, meditation students ever consider this to be a problem, for the ideals about meditative experience seem to be so
generally accepted that people are easily led to believe that these ideal states of mind are indeed based on reality. Let's take for
example the ideal that the optimum meditative state is one that is free of thoughts. It is usually conceived to be a pure
(luminous) state of consciousness where thinking does not occur. With the absence of thinking, there is no self or ego, and thus
the mind is pure. It also must be an awake, peaceful, and sublime state of mind, though some traditions might consider it to be
more ordinary than sublime. Anyhow, the student gets the idea that to be empty of thoughts is an ideal meditative state, one
which is only to be achieved by practicing the prescribed meditation instructions meant to get one there.
This approach makes perfect sense. One has an ideal state of consciousness to be realized through meditation and a practice to
get one there. What is missing from this scenario is the real difficulties one encounters in meditating with that practice, for it is
presented as a formula, which when followed correctly is believed to lead to the right outcome: freedom from thoughts. The
student thus meditates according to the instructions so that an ideal state of mind becomes a constant state of mind (which is
an ideal upon an ideal, for the student believes that ideal states are ideally constant). This way of meditating can turn any
experience which is not ideal into a negative or unproductive or worthless state of mind.
I hear this kind of sitting often from students who practice trying arrive at ideal scenarios for their meditation sittings. A student
goes into the meditation sitting to empty his mind of thoughts and finds himself thinking all the time. All thinking is seen as an
obstacle, a hindrance, and even as a defilement. It must be gotten rid of somehow. So he tries holding his attention on the
breath, a mantra, an internal image or feeling, or on sounds to see if he can free himself from thinking. But thinking keeps
intruding into his meditation sitting. He may then put his attention on catching the moment where each thought begins, hoping
thereby to cut it off at the root. All of his energy is focused on the elimination of thinking, so as to arrive at states of mind where
there is no thinking. This state of no thinking is what meditation is supposed to be, or at least lead to, and yet what meditation
has become is a battleground to eliminate thought. What the meditation student is actually going through is a process of trying
to get rid of thinking, but what he thinks he is going through is a process of realizing an idealized state of mind where there is no
thought. When this kind of meditation sitting is looked at without the ideal scenario coloring one's perception of it, the student
sees that he is using aggressive effort to suppress thoughts.
The ideal scenario thus tends to hide what is really going on in one's meditation sittings. When I hear students talk about sittings
in terms of such scenarios, it has an air of looking good by at least attempting to meditate correctly (in that form of meditation),
even though their meditation experiences look bad to them much of the time. Meeting an ideal is not easy. It may not even be
possible. So anyone trying to do it will often fail and carry with them the feeling of failing at meditation, instead of seeing that
realizing an ideal is not much different from making a fantasy come true. Both have a picture of how things should be and
obscure or distract one from how things are.

UNLEARNING MEDITATION BLOG

This is a collection of short pieces that Jason Siff wrote for his monthly
blog from July 2010 through November 2013. They are organized according
to content rather than posting date.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE SIMPLE MEDITATION INSTRUCTIONS
RE-DEFINING MEDITATION
THE AUTHORITATIVE OBSERVER
CONFLICTING EMOTIONS
MEDITATING WITHOUT A STRATEGY
GETTING IT

QUESTION & ANSWER

DONT WE NEED TO BE AWARE?
STRANGE THINGS THAT HAPPEN WHEN WE MEDITATE
THE 2 WHEELS

THE SIMPLE MEDITATION INSTRUCTIONS

The simple meditation instructions found in Unlearning Meditation
are seeds for many things to grow and change in ones meditation sittings
and in ones life. Sitting in a still posture with awareness of ones body
(contact points, the hands touching) while allowing ones thoughts and
feelings sets up certain conditions. These are conditions in that they influence
how ones experiences unfold and how one relates to those experiences.
Such conditions as gentleness, permission (flexibility), tolerance,
and interest are supported by the initial instruction to allow ones thoughts
and feelings, ones life, into ones meditation sittings.
There is also a quality of renunciation in this way of meditating. One
renounces self-agency. That is, you do not try to make anything happen.
But then again, you might experience trying to make something happen.
You allow that as well, so that you can see how you try to make things happen.
By doing so, you are allowing your experience to unfold according to
conditions instead of making your mind do what you want it to.
The distinction between doing and allowing is not so clear. When you
have many opportunities to choose what you will put your attention on,
and you make different choices, then there is a quality of flexibility. This is
doing that is based on the conditions you are aware of. You are not doing
something because that is what you were told to do, but because you are
aware of the conditions in your experience in such a way that you can
choose to do something that meets those conditions.

RE-DEFINING MEDITATION
Meditation is fundamentally an introspective activity. It includes the
experiences of our senses, but is not limited to a mere noticing of sense
impressions or a focused attention on bodily activities. If that were the
case, the Buddha would have stopped at the first foundation of mindfulness,
that of the body, and not gone on to teach the awareness of pleasure
and pain and their absence (the second foundation); the awareness of
thoughts, emotions, and mental states (the third foundation); and the
awareness of all that which needs to be known to understand the Dharma
(the fourth foundation).
We learn through our thoughts and emotions, not just from our sense
impressions and intuitions. But it seems that the world of thoughts and
emotions often gets excluded from meditation practices as that which people
are trying to transcend or eliminate, rather than as the arena for growth
and wisdom. The criticism that meditation would become too psychological
if it included our mental activity is one that I face often. The mind one experiences
in meditation is the same as the one that presents itself in psychotherapy,
so perhaps the difference between meditation and psychotherapy
has nothing to do with the contents of ones mind, but with the different
formats, techniques, and agendas of those two fields. As those two

fields become closer together, and more intertwined, the differences actually
become less defined, though there are two key differences I would like
to point out: 1) meditation does not require interaction with another
human being, while psychotherapy generally does, and 2) meditation does
not require the immediate articulation of ones experiences, while psychotherapy
generally does. These two differences are related to each other,
and only apply to silent forms of meditation.
Using silent meditation practice as our reference point, I would like
for you to consider these two definitions of meditation: 1) Meditation is
what follows upon the intention to meditate, and 2) Whatever one experiences
in meditation is meditation.
Meditation is what follows upon the intention to meditate. When we
learn a set of meditation instructions and then use them in our meditation
sittings, whatever follows from that is meditation. The instruction can be
to be aware of the breath, recite a mantra, practice visualization, observe
bodily sensations, contemplate a teaching, perform an inquiry into ones
experience, focus on emotions, notice ones thoughts, allow anything to
come up, or any number of meditation practices. Adopting a meditation
posture with the intention of doing a particular meditation practice is the
basis for calling what you are doing meditation.
I would add however, that the experiences one has of doing that practice
dont have to be restricted to the experiences of doing the instruction
correctly for it to be deemed meditation. Any experiences one has while
doing a particular meditation practice is meditation. This brings me to the
second definition: whatever one experiences in meditation is meditation.
Under this definition, if one were to practice metta meditation and find illwill
and dislike arise around a person one is generating loving-kindness
for, then one might sit with the ill-will and begin to accept it as part of the
practice of doing metta, since it came up while doing it. The same would
hold true with the breath, where one might find in trying to hold ones attention
on the breath, a certain tension forms around doing that, and that
tension can become a focus of the practice. But when there is no particular
instruction that one is supposed to follow in the meditation sitting, then
the whole array of experiences that occur upon the intention to meditate is
meditation. This is the most inclusive form of meditation: nothing is excluded.
That is the direction I believe the Third and Fourth Foundations of
Mindfulness are addressing.

THE AUTHORITATIVE OBSERVER (a fictional portrayal)

As I was sitting and thinking one day, I became aware that I was sitting
and thinking. This awareness of thinking was a bit sudden, but I surmised
it had been there all along and I just wasnt aware of it. As I got to
know it, I began calling it, My Observer. He would notice everything,
every little thing. I couldnt think a thought without being immediately told
that I had thought this thought. And, usually, the thought was considered a
mundane thought, or a bad impulse, or a wrong notion. This observer is a
great authority on thoughtshe knows the right label for each thought and
whether it is wholesome or not.

It sounds like I am familiar with this observer, but that is not the case.
I really know nothing about him. He doesnt seem to have a past, at least
one with pictures, places, and people. His past is an indefinite expanse of
time, without beginning, without events, and without places where he has
lived or things he has done. In fact, I dont recall he has done anything in
his life other than observe the life of someone else. He seems so skilled at
observing that I doubt I could be his first subject. But how could he go
from life to life, person to person? No, he must be my observer. If that is
so, then he is very young indeed, maybe but a few days old, for how could
he have been around longer than that without my noticing him? But he acts
so mature; he knows so much about human behavior.
I wish he had a face, so I could see how old he is, where he comes
from, what kinds of facial expressions accompany his comments, judgments,
and directives. But he just sits there in the background of my
thoughts watching and noticing and announcing his observations. When I
try to get to know him by listening more closely to his voice, I can conjure
up a picture of a big man, a towering being who looks down on me. He
never whispers, always speaking as though addressing a large audience.
We do not have intimate dialogues, my observer and me. Weve never
shared a joke or willingly let slip a confidence. He knows my faults when
they happen, while I never know any of his imperfections, believing that he
is flawless. The relationship is a bit one-sided. But he is the authoritative
observer after all. Perhaps the only way to get to know him is to acquire the
services of another observer. But then wouldnt there be an observer observing
the observer observing me?

COMMENTARY
In the short sketch, The Authoritative Observer, I portray the confusing
situation of discovering an observer in ones meditation sittings. I believe
that such observing or witnessing selves are developed through mindfulness
meditation techniques by simply following the instructions to be
mindful of ones experiences. The notions of being unattached (or detached),
equanimous (non-reactive), and clearly comprehending what one is
observing are all important features of much Vipassana meditation instruction.
This way of practicing however can support Vedantist views on inner
experience, such as there being an unchanging pure self, a permanent transcendent
reality, and an eternal higher truth.
The character in this story becomes aware of the faceless and all
knowing aspects of this observing consciousness, but does not end his investigation
there. He wants to know this observing consciousness history,
his appearance, his actions, etc. The observer is not a separate higher self
in his eyes, but rather a more or less ordinary self that has taken up an exalted
and privileged status within his psyche. In some ways, this observer
is the super-ego of Freudian psychology; it is also the ideal self which the
character aspires to become. The characters skepticism is never fully satisfied
with what he finds, so he appeals to another authority, though his
direction to create another, better observer will no doubt repeat the same
scenario.

It is fairly common for meditators to fall into states of mind where

there seems to be a separation between the observer and the observed
(whether the observed phenomena are bodily sensations, perceptions,
thoughts, or emotions). In the present moment, that often seems to be the
case, but upon reflection one might see that there is no separation between
the observer and the observed. That is one advantage of a meditation practice
that emphasizes recollecting ones experiencesone can see that if
knowing a thought occurs at the same time as the thought then they must
be inter-related and not separate.
If one meditates in a way that I recommend, allowing thoughts and
feelings into ones meditation sittings, these experiences of a separate detached
observer will occur with much less frequency. And when they do,
one would have been so accustomed to reflecting back on ones experiences
and questioning ones assumptions about them, that it is unlikely
one would develop beliefs in a higher self.

CONFLICTING EMOTIONS
We hardly ever feel one way about something. Conflicting emotions
aptly describes this situationso rarely do our emotions cooperate and
bring harmony and peace.
Perhaps that is why most meditation techniques advocate creating
some kind of distance from any emotional conflict. Some may even teach
that from the perspective from Ultimate Reality, emotional conflict doesnt
exist, it is just an illusion. Others may teach that conflicting emotions are
just fabrications, imaginations, unwholesome states of mind. A minority of
meditation teachers may grant emotional conflict some space while still
teaching that the point of meditation is to get beyond emotions that cause
conflict.
In all of this discussion, I havent really said what I mean by conflicting
emotions. If one is honest about ones emotions, none of them seem to
arise in a pure form. Some people just cant be annoyed without being impatient,
without wanting something different to happen, without some
guilt or shame for feeling that way, and some neurotic need to change their
mood from annoyance to something more presentable. Their trouble with
being annoyed may not be the feeling of annoyance, but the interaction of
impatience, desire, guilt, self-consciousness, and other less pronounced
emotions that might find their way into this particular emotional cocktail.
When such emotional cocktails present themselves in meditation,
choose to sit with them. Let them stir, flow through your system, even intoxicate
you if they will. That is the only way youll find out what they are
made up of. You may not feel at peace, your emotions wont be harmonious,
but you are listening to each emotion tell its story, and that is a
kindness to yourself.

MEDITATING WITHOUT A STRATEGY

Most of us think strategically and find it unnatural to approach situations,
such as what may come up in meditation, without a game plan. No
one wants to be ill prepared for a foreseeable problem. Several of the questions
people ask me about meditation have to do with finding a good strategy

for what might arise in their meditation sittings: What should I do

when an emotion gets overwhelming? How can I get my mind to stop obsessing?
Which train of thought should I choose to follow?
When someone is new to this approach to meditation, I give pat answers
to these questions as a way to help them at the beginning. It would
be unkind of me not to. But these initial strategies will run their course and
become ineffective. For instance, bringing your attention to the stillness of
your body sitting may help when an emotion gets overwhelming, but at
some point it will stop working its magic, and you will have to find some
other way to meet that situation.
I suggest you go through your experiences in meditation, reflect back
on them, and learn more about the ways you were with them. This kind of
trial-and-error learning is often done in the service of creating new and better
strategies, but here it is done to develop trust that you didnt need to
have a strategy for what arises in meditationthat you will be able to meet
your meditation experiences, whatever they may be, with qualities of mind
that will help you with them.
There is a kind of courage to go into meditation without a strategy.
Some may think it reckless not to know what you are going to when certain
things happen, but it may not be reckless if you have sufficient trust from
what you have experienced in meditation that your mind will find a way
through any difficulty. That is one reason why the recollection of your experiences
in meditation is very importantit enables you to know your
mind in meditation, and to know how it has attended to an experience.

GETTING IT
Every meditation practice seems to have a particular experience of
getting it. That experience may not be the goal of meditation, but it is a
defining momentit is when the meditation practice makes sense, it is full
of possibility, and all you have to do is keep meditating. Whatever meditation
practice a person does, this experience of getting it, and becoming
grounded in it, is essential.
What does this look like in Recollective Awareness meditation?
First of all, people tend to go back and forth a good deal with this type
of open meditation practice. They go through periods of doubting it, even
though they may have had experiences that were positive and confirming.
They also go through periods of trusting it. It is one of the few meditation
practices that truly lets the student open up to doubt and confusion, and
those who teach this approach support their students going through periods
of doubt rather than discounting or dispelling the doubt. So one way in
which people seem to get this approach is by working through their doubts
about it.
Secondly, the inner experience of meditation seems to be more effortless
and there is less resistance to what may emerge. I often hear people
say how they can sit with unpleasant thoughts and emotions without much
problem. That doesnt mean they no longer get overwhelmed by certain intense
emotions. There is just less of a need to do another form of meditation
to manage or diminish such thoughts and emotions, and more

willingness to sit with and explore thoughts and emotions as they naturally
arise in meditation.
Thirdly, various meditative states arise within peoples sittings that
were not present before. For some folks, all they needed was permission to
let their mind drift in meditation and allow thoughts and emotions to go
on. When they do, they find themselves going into tranquil states instead
of falling asleep as they had feared. They also find that thoughts can be
fragmented and not make sense, and that doesnt mean theyre going
crazy; it just means that the states of mind they are entering allow for
more fluidity and variation in their thoughts and images. There are many
kinds of meditative states that people go into, and in teaching this approach,
we try to make each one an area of interest, something to explore,
and not states of mind to be avoided, praised, or made into things. Some
people feel that once they have had some profound and unusual states of
mind in meditation that they have gotten a taste of what meditation can be.
Lastly, while confidence, effortlessness, non-resistance to unpleasant
experiences and the cultivation of meditative states are all good things to
emerge from meditating, there is still something else we need to get from
meditation. And that is how meditation can profoundly change our lives,
our relationships, our work, the ways we are in the world. If people dont
get how their meditation practice affects their life and how their life affects
their meditation practice, then the meditation practice is understood as
something separate from their life. When meditation is done as something
separate, your life is kept out of the meditation sitting. In Recollective
Awareness meditation the opposite is trueyour life belongs in the meditation
sitting. Getting it is then not about getting the practice right, but
rather, truly getting how your life can come into your meditation sittings
and be positively transformed by the meditative process.

QUESTION & ANSWER

When I meditate, all I do is think.
Then think.
But how is that meditation? You ask.
At first, it isnt. But after a while, as ones relationship to thoughts
changes, it becomes meditation. And then I go on to explain.
Allowing thinking to continue unimpeded in a meditation sitting
might initially feel no different from ordinary daily ruminations, obsessions,
problem-solving or planning sessions. It doesnt fit into any definition
of meditation one is aware of. The whole experience seems to be the
opposite of what meditation is supposed to be. But, then, lets look on the
bright side. You are not constantly monitoring and interrupting your
thoughts with reminders to bring your attention back to the breath, or a
mantra, or any primary object of meditation. You may feel less pressured
to do a meditation instruction correctly, to be productive and get results.
You may have little or no resistance to your thoughts and not be in any
kind of battle with them. The atmosphere of your mind might actually be a
bit more peaceful.The relationship with your thoughts has begun to
change, and with it, meditating with thinking becomes less of a problem, if

a problem at all.
That is nicely said, but how do I get my relationship to my thoughts
to change?
You work on that relationship, like you would with another person.
You listen, take in, and feel what your thoughts are saying. You become interested
in your thoughts. You dont want to get rid of them, but rather,
want to learn how to live with them. You want to get to know them so intimately
that you understand more of why they show up at certain times,
what keeps them going, and how harmful ones may actually begin to diminish
their influence.
Didnt the Buddha advocate quieting the mind and going beyond
thinking?
It appears he did. But we can quiet our mind in a variety of ways. Meditating
with gentleness towards your thoughts and interest in them can create
the conditions for your mind to quiet down just as much as being aware
of the breath or any such calming practice. Becoming wise regarding the
process of thinking is, in a way, going beyond thinkingyou have less belief
in the validity and solidity of your thoughts when you understand their
dependently arisen nature.
Are you saying that the way to go beyond thinking is to look into the
nature of thinking rather than arriving at a transcendent state where thinking
vanishes?
Yes.

DONT WE NEED TO BE AWARE?

For some kind of psychological change to occur, dont we need to develop
greater awareness of that which is to be changed or eliminated in
order for it to change or disappear? Another way of putting this question
is: Do you have to be aware of a behavior for it to change? Or can it change
by being aware of something else in your experience, such as the breath in
meditation?
You might suggest that such questions would be better answered by
scientific research. But am I not posing these questions to come to some
kind of final conclusion, but rather to explore two opposing views regarding
psychological (or spiritual) change in meditation. One view is that particular
practices will produce sought after change, such as less anger, less
reactivity, or less craving and attachment by the practitioner faithfully and
ardently doing a particular meditation practice, such as awareness of the
breath. The meditator, in this instance, does not have to be aware of his
anger, reactivity, or craving, but rather brings his awareness to his breath,
and through that practice experiences, as a kind of by-product, a reduction
in anger, reactivity, and craving. The other view is that for anger, reactivity,
and craving to actually reduce and cease, instead of being only temporarily
suppressed (which in itself provides needed relief from the distress
these things cause), there has to some awareness of how anger, reactivity,
and craving function. That is, there has to be some awareness of
what feeds them and keeps them going, and what leads to their diminishing
and fading away.

As with opposing views that both make sense, the solution may be to
say that both are true. Sometimes just awareness of the breath or bodily
sensations may lead to the lessening or loss of some kind of suffering,
while sometimes the awareness and understanding of the dependently
arisen nature of anger and craving does indeed lead to their lessening and
disappearance. Both are good. They can work together. A practice of being
aware of the breath and that of being aware of thoughts and emotions can
support each other. Sometimes desires subside when given attention and
explored, while at other times they may subside after a period of being focused
on the breath. Both are meditative experiences people have.
A person will make choices as to which teachings to follow, and which
practices to do, based on whether he or she believes that greater awareness
of a behavior leads to exploring and understanding it in ways that diminish
its hold, or, that awareness put on a wholesome object of attention will
have a way of diminishing or eradicating that behavior. Those who believe
that change occurs through awareness, discernment, and investigation of
all mental states will be more likely to consider practices that lead to tolerating
and accepting negative or unwanted behaviors (as thoughts and emotions
experienced during meditation), so that they can explore them more
fully. Those who believe that placing ones attention on what are taught to
be wholesome objects as the way to change or eliminate negative behaviors
will most likely choose practices such as awareness of breathing, metta
meditation, tonglen, and other similar practices. Then there are those who
believe both are proper ways to meditate and seek to combine these two
contrary approaches in their meditation practice.
I consider these approaches contrary because they can often get in the
way of each other. Always bringing your attention back to the breath will
clip your thoughts in a way that will make awareness of them and further
exploration of them difficult, if not impossible. Allowing your thoughts and
emotions to go on and on in your meditation sitting will interfere with attempts
to keep your attention on your breath for any length of time. These
two approaches may then only become compatible when done separately.
When engaged in a practice of allowing thoughts and emotions in meditation,
there may be periods where your attention becomes drawn to the
breath and you could then decide to focus your attention on the breath as
you would in a conventional awareness of breathing practice. The reverse
of this, shifting from a focused awareness on the breath to a broad open
awareness of thoughts and emotions has been taught as an advanced form
of some Vipassana, Zen, and Tibetan practices.
One difference between these two approaches is that the first one, allowing
thoughts and emotions to be the initial objects of meditation, enables
you to be with the thoughts and emotions as they normally present
themselves in daily life. It provides an opportunity to develop awareness of
certain behaviors, and to explore them within your mind in meditation
more thoroughly. The second and more commonly taught approach, of
moving from the breath to awareness of thoughts and emotions, usually
pacifies or inhibits thoughts and emotionsso that what is then known

tends to be a more manageable, more sedate version of those behaviors.

The meditator will often have difficulty exploring those behaviors due to
the related thoughts and emotions (as well as memories and intentions)
having become diffuse and slippery. It is fairly common for intense emotions
and their related mental verbalizations to die down and subside when
ones mind has become extremely tranquil. However, those behaviors have
not gone away for good.
The skillfulness of your meditation practice may lie, practically speaking,
in how well each of these approaches compensates for what is lacking
in the other. Your periods of exploration into a particular mental state,
such as ill-will, adds knowledge of that state of mind that you cannot get
by always putting your attention on your breath. Likewise, your periods of
being with the breath can provide added calm and focus, which may not
arise from staying with your thoughts and emotions for extended periods
in your sittings.
There is a particular twist here however. By meditating with problematic
emotions, such as ill-will and lust, you may actually be putting your attention
on compassion for yourself experiencing those emotions, or on the
patience you have while sitting with them, or your interest in understanding
them more fully rather than the perpetuation and gratification of them.
This awareness of wholesome mental states within the experience of socalled
unwholesome mental states may actually lead to a similar calm
and focused state as would awareness of the breath.

STRANGE THINGS THAT HAPPEN WHEN WE MEDITATE

This is a subject that is dear to my heart. If it werent for strange
things happening when I began meditating, I probably would have lost interest
in it. Thats not to say I would have stopped meditating if nothing
strange had happened; its just that I dont know if I would have been as interested
in my mind if it was plain, normal, or ordinary throughout my
meditation sittings.
What kind of strange things are we talking about here? Well, for one
thing, we are talking about our mind shifting sideways, lurching into some
kind of altered state, when just a moment ago all was ordinary. This can
happen when you are sleepy or relaxed in meditation, as well as when you
are alert and focused. It can happen early on in the meditation sitting or a
few moments before the bell. And it can happen many times throughout a
meditation sitting, where you are going into some kind of a strange unusual
state of consciousness for some seconds and then pop out of it into a
more or less ordinary state, only to be drawn in again some moments later.
I was talking with a student the other day about his experiences of
going into a short-lived fog and emerging from it with greater clarity,
which would last a minute or so before that inner fog would roll in again.
Instead of talking about why that was happening or what it meant, for that
would be speculation on both of our parts, we talked about what he remembered
from that experience. It wasnt visual for him. He was hearing
other people talk. They were having a conversation within his mind, but
what they said was difficult to recall. A few words came back after he

emerged from the fog, and they were usually names of people, or short,
simple comments. As he recalled these snippets of inner conversation, he
became aware of what he knew about this foggy state of consciousness. He
knew he did not create it, that it arose of its own and left of its own, that
he was none of the people conversing in his mind, but he really didnt
know whose voices they were. Very strange indeed. But quite common.
Another strange experience, which many meditators get used to and
some fall in love with, is that bright light shining in your eyes, though
often it seems located in the center of your forehead. For some people
these bright lights might even come from behind or the sides or from deep
within. It may just be a beam, or a ball, of light, but it can easily be a sheet
of light or an image that arises and stays a moment before vanishing. People
like to make things out of these experiences as well, for we reason that
there must be a reason for them. Once again, I prefer to ask questions
about what you might have recalled when this light or image arose. This
kind of inquiry leads to greater awareness of the state of consciousness
and how it functions, taking the emphasis away from what the light or
image might mean.
The last strange thing Ill talk about here is the odd, and initially unsettling,
experience of your mind getting slippery and having moments of
losing consciousness. When this happens, some people experience fear, as
if they have lost complete control of their consciousness. No one who has
reported this experience to me has ever lost his mind, but it does feel as
though that can happen at first. You cant hold onto thoughts or sensations,
they just keep slipping out of your grasp, and you may feel a slight
speeding up at times or a sensation of falling, of slipping and sliding, or of
vanishing. What people often recall from this experience is the sensation of
returning to a more ordinary consciousness and/or that initial period of experiencing
slipping, falling, vanishing. Often, it is not possible to recall
what happened during any period of not being conscious. All that we can
recall are the borders on either side of the gap in awareness. And that is
enough to know these experiences better. Once again, we try not to make
any meaning out of such strange happenings; we trust that our recollection
and discernment of such experiences will lead to further exploration of
them.

THE 2 WHEELS
I was sitting in meditation the other day and during a tranquil stretch
of time a memorable thought arose. It had a rather compelling voice and an
interesting message: Knowing the wheel and knowing suffering are not the
same. After the sitting, I was struck by the word wheel and how I usually
use it in reference to samsara, the wheel of existence. But the Buddhas the
notion of wheel is that of a chakra, and in his case, it is not about
chakras on ones subtle body, but of the Dharma chakra, the wheel of the
teaching. This wheel can be seen as having eight spokes, each one signifying
a factor of the Nobel Eightfold Path.
The cycles of experience that give rise to suffering are thus not the
same as cycles of cultivation that are conducive to liberation from it. But

that does not mean that they operate in isolation from each other. Going
into angry thoughts and feelings may be accompanied by a kindness and
patience with the anger, as well as an interest in it. When that is so, you are
turning the wheel of the Dharma, not the one of samsara, for that just may
running on its own steam. You will then begin to recognize when the
Dharma wheel is absent, as the wheel of existence pushes into being more
of the same kind of experiences in the world. With the Dharma wheel present,
the wheel of existence is checked, halted, and slowly dismantled.
Side by side, these wheels turn, and we just keep on sitting. At times,
we may know when the wheel of existence is about to pick up steam, and
learn what qualities to bring to that experience so the wheel of the Dharma
can also move to overtake it. Other times, we may know when the wheel of
the Dharma is about to lurch into motion, and we can learn what qualities
can gently support it. It may not always be the same qualities. Sometimes
awareness helps the wheel turn, while at other times kindness moves in
that direction, and then there are those times when a combination of qualities
and faculties are needed. There is so much to learn about how to turn a
Dharma wheel.
Unlearning Meditation

Chapter 2
Gentle Intentions
The limb of the Buddhas eightfold path that deals with intentions expressly states that
two types of intentions to develop in ones practice are those of non-harming and not
killing. These are intentions to be gentle and kind.
We are not used to things changing through being gentle and kind, thinking that we must
take decisive action or discipline ourselves with harsh methods (which in-clude
punishment and/or shame). There has to be some kind of faith or trust in the ef-ficacy of
gentle intentions to produce changes, for it doesnt make rational sense that by being
kind and patient, and by essentially doing less, we will transform in signifi-cant ways.
We tend to prefer the aggressive or rationally regimented direct approaches to change,
such as working hard on one thing or taking a prescribed course of training. Something
indirect, such as being gentle and allowing with ones inner experience, doesnt meet the
rational requirements, doesnt suit the belief that change comes about by doing
something that aims directly at what needs to be changed.
The third kind of intention the Buddha speaks of is the intention to renounce. It too is a
soft intention, but it is often practiced in a strong, determined way that is not soft at all.
What you renounce while unlearning meditation is not any previously learned meditation
technique but, rather, any strong intentions that may have been at-tached to the
technique. It becomes possible to do the meditation practices with gentle

intentions. If youve learned, for example, to follow the breath as a meditation prac-tice,
this approach isnt about abandoning that practice but rather, its about doing it without
a strong intention. An example would be if you find yourself noticing the breath and you
are able to gently focus your attention for a short while, seeing if it will stay there
naturally or not. If your attention doesnt stay with the breath, then let it move to where
it will. But if it does, you will be with the breath and experience the benefits of that
practice, even though your attention may only stay there for a minute or so.
LOOSENING AROUND THE INSTRUCTIONS
The tension between the instructions you use and your mind as it is in medita-tion leads
to tightening or loosening around the instructions. When we tighten around meditation
instructions, we try to do them exclusively, rigidly, correctly. When we loosen around
meditation instructions, we do them loosely, partially, or not at all.
There can often be a tightening around an instruction when you first learn it. It cant be
helped. That is what we do when we receive instructions and try to do them correctly.
We dont follow an instruction with the intent to be loose with it, for that would open the
door for failure, for forgetting the instruction, for doing something other than the
prescribed practice. No, we tend to want to do the instruction well, even perfectly, and
get all the promised benefits from it.
The problem here is the type of intention that is required to do the instruction. To
pursue this with you, I would have to propose that you consider that there are two types
of intention to be found in the meditation instructions themselves:
Strong, harsh, rigid intentions
Gentle, light, flexible intentions
What tends to happen to you when you hear a meditation instruction such as, Be aware
of your breath; when your mind wanders, bring it back to the breath is that you have a
strong, harsh, rigid intention to do just that. There is no room for doing any-thing else.
The sole purpose of meditation becomes keeping your attention on the breath at all
times.
What happens when that instruction becomes gentler, friendlier, more allowing? Say the
teacher phrases it as, Be aware of your breath. When your mind wanders, gen-tly lead it
back to the breath. Is that going to create a gentle intention instead of a harsh one? In
my experience, it does not. In fact, it tends to set up a bind. You are still being told to
disregard thoughts and to concentrate on the breath. Paradoxically, until there is a true
allowing and acceptance of thoughts in meditation, it is unlikely you will learn how to
gently disengage from thinking. The imperative to pull yourself out of each mindwandering goes against the conditions that would lead to gentleness.
If you have been following the grand theme of the tension between the medita-tion
instructions you use and your mind as it is, you will see that any instruction that

asks you to concentrate on one part of your experience (the breath) and exclude oth-er
parts of your experience (thoughts) will set up an internal struggle when the two are not
in harmony (such as fighting off thoughts to stay with the breath). You could say that the
purpose of learning the practice to be aware of the breath is to conquer the minds own
natural wildness and bring it in line with the breath. A struggle with your mind as it is
occurs from the very outset by disallowing mind-wandering.
Long ago, having realized this and other problems with the instruction of fol-lowing the
breath, I decided not to teach meditation using it. Awareness of the breath is something I
see people come to some time down the road on their own, when a good deal of
harshness and rigidity has been weeded out of their meditation prac-tice. Then it can be
accomplished gently and effortlessly.
What I teach people new to meditation is to start with an awareness of the body sitting
still. But it is hard to begin with an awareness of your whole body. So I ask them to start
with bringing their attention to the touch of their hands on top of each other in their
laps. The idea is not to hold your attention there all the time, but to al-low thoughts and
feelings into the sitting also.
During the meditation sitting, anything that happens is okay. Falling asleep, planning a
trip, worrying about a relationship, fantasizing, daydreaming, problem solving, anything.
Wherever your mind goes, whatever comes up, however you feel, it is all okay. If you
forget to notice your hands touching for a long period of time, that is fine too. All that is
required of you is to sit still, but if you need to move, do so, and then resume a still
posture. Your eyes can be closed or open, though I often find that this practice is more
effective with eyes closed.
This may sound too loose to be a legitimate form of meditation. If your idea of
meditation is staying with (or trying to stay with) a particular object of meditation
throughout the sitting, then this certainly doesnt count as meditation. And that is part
of what can keep people from embarking on the path of unlearning meditation: it does
not meet the commonly held views as to what meditation is. The practice of unlearning
meditation is, very simply, being with your experience of meditating. It is not about the
meditation instructions, but about what you experience in meditation. The chart below
can be used to compare traditional meditation practices centered on the instructions and
this approach of unlearning meditation:
Not only is the orientation different, so is the way it is taught.
In my workshops I ask people to take a few minutes after each sitting to call back to
mind what they can remember from it. Often they can remember only a few things. So I
suggest that you start with what you remember most easily and then try

to recall things that are less clear. You can write down your recollections in a notebook
or journal. Recollective Awareness Meditation gets its name from this feature of recalling and journaling sittings. The purpose of the recollection is to become familiar with
your experiences in meditation. I will go into this in more depth later on, but for now
what you need to know is that we can use our memory to cultivate present-moment
awareness. It is generally believed by those who teach and practice mindful-ness
meditation that present-moment awareness (mindfulness) is developed by using
techniques that bring one into the present moment. That is a direct approach to
achieving the aim of being in the present.
Recollective Awareness is an indirect approach that accomplishes the same thing, but
instead of only learning how to be present with the breath and bodily/sense experience
as in the mindfulness techniques, one learns to be present with emotional and mental
states, for that is what is often recalled. By recalling what you were experi-encing
emotionally in the meditation sitting afterward, you become more able to stay with
similar emotional experiences when they arise again. And not only that, but you also
become more interested in them and skilled in exploring them.
An important part of Recollective Awareness Meditation for many people has been
talking about their meditation experiences with a teacher. Since some readers of this
book may not have access to a teacher, I am including the stories from individuals who
have been meditating in this way, along with some actual journal entries from their
sittings, including my observations and comments. I hope that you will be able to relate
to some of what people have gone through and use that to further support your
meditation practice. And you could always to decide to attend one of my workshops or
retreats, or those held by teachers I have trained.
In summary, listed below are the basic meditation instructions I give to begin-ning
meditators. If you already have a meditation practice, you can try these instruc-tions, or
you can meditate in the ways you are accustomed to.
Find a quiet spot to meditate where you most likely wont be disturbed by others or by
the phone. Decide how long you are going to sit (anywhere from ten to forty minutes)
and either set an alarm or have a clock nearby to peek at on occasion.
Sit in a comfortable posture, one that you feel you will not need to change for the
duration of the sitting, either on a chair, on a couch, or on a meditation mat or cushion.
But if you do need to move during the meditation sitting, try to move slowly and quietly
into a more comfortable posture.
Close your eyes and bring your attention to the touch of your hands resting one on top
of the other in your lap. But don't hold your attention there. Instead, allow your mind to
go where it will. If you are drawn into thoughts, feelings, memo-ries, or fantasies, let
your attention go there. Your attention may at times also be drawn to sounds, bodily
sensations, fragrances or odors, or your breath.

When you feel that you have been away from the contact of your hands for several
minutes, you can remind yourself to come back to the hands and stay there for a few
seconds before allowing your mind to wander again.
If you feel restless, bored, confused, discouraged, elated, sleepy, upset, anything, it is
okay. You don't have to do anything about it, or you can bring your attention back to the
touch of your hands. But if you do, just stay with your hands for a little while, and then
if your mind wants to go back into the feelings or thoughts that you left, you can let it go
there. If something else draws your attention, you can let it.
When the meditation sitting is over, take a couple of minutes to mentally recall what you
can of the sitting. If you would like to journal your meditation sitting, just try to write a
description of what you remember.
And, you dont have to meditate every day.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR JOURNALING
Before writing down the sitting, write down the date and time that the sitting took place.
This is helpful when referring back to the journal entry.
There are two basic ways to begin writing it down: to make a list or to write a narra-tive.
If you decide to make a list of the events you recall from the sitting, I sug-gest that you
use longer descriptions than single words.
You dont need to write down the sitting in chronological order. You can start with what
you remember most easily, and once you have that on paper, you can write down the
other things that start to come to mind from the meditation. For those who like to have
journal entries in chronological order, you can always rewrite the journal entry
afterwards, putting it in order, or mark entries in some way to give a picture of when
they occurred.
Your descriptions do not have to be exact. They just need to be truthful. If a de-scription
doesnt feel accurate, that is fine, as long as you are being honest. We cant hold
ourselves to a high standard of precision and accuracy in this endeav-or.
Try to keep your journal entries focused on what went on during the meditation sit-ting.
In the course of writing things down, you might have some thoughts about an
experience. You may write down your afterthoughts, but mark them in a way that shows
they did not occur in the sitting (such as by putting them in paren-theses).
You will remember only a fraction of what goes on in many of your sittings. That is
perfectly normal. Just write down what you can recollect. That is enough. Some journal
entries may be many paragraphs long, while others may just have a cou-ple of sentences.

Below is an examples from someones meditation journal.

Sunday, August 6, 2006 8 am to 9 am
Many thoughts about office space, buildings, leases, etc. Not really lost in the thoughts
or only for brief moments. Started to think that I wanted to know what to do about all of
these things in a different waynot necessarily via thinking and weighing options. This
thought led to a further distance from the thoughts, a closer more dis-passionate
viewing. This was accompanied by a slowing down in thoughts and then I noticed the
orange-yellow light glowing behind my eyelids, and the tracking of my thoughts slowed
to one at a time rather than in overlapping multiples. My awareness also began moving
to my breathing at regular intervals. Started to think about how Im growing very
comfortable with my thoughts/thinking, not as frantically paced as they have been in the
past, more floating sometimes dancing lightly from one to the nextI felt at ease and
peace with the thoughts and the processsame thoughts as in the be-ginning of the sit,
all the practical day-to-day stuffsmiling.
You can also list your experiences, as below.
1. Thinking about leasing office space, only lost in the thoughts briefly
2. Wanting some other way to handle these things, not by thinking about them
3. Felt more distant from the thoughts, more dispassionate
4. Saw an orange-yellow light
5. My thoughts slowed down to one at a time
6. Became aware of breathing at regular intervals
7. Felt at ease with the thoughts and the process
8. Ended the sit smiling