I drove home last week and couldn’t tell you how I got there. It was a kind of autopilot. Not in an alarming way. I stopped at the lights; I made the turns. I must have done it because I got home safely. Somewhere in the last mile it occurred to me that I had…
Most of us have something that sticks in the mind so well we can’t not know it. A phone number from childhood. A chant. A song you’d swear you never learned on purpose. You don’t retrieve it — it’s just there. This is how we explain the ninth stage of concentration meditation. When we recite…
Especially — but not only — if you’re new to meditation, most of us have this experience: You sit down. You settle the body. You bring the object to mind. And then some unmeasured stretch of time goes by — could be forty seconds, could be four minutes — before you notice that you are…
In June, I spent two days in Toronto teaching a retreat called The Conditioned Mind. It explored Buddhist psychology side by side with Western accounts of how we think, feel, and suffer. One of the delightful things for me was that the room was mixed. There were long-time students of Paramita Centers, people new to…
“Stay focused on the object” is the instruction we get, but it’s hard to follow because we don’t know how. Focused like gripping a rope? Like ensuring planes don’t crash into each other? Like watching the back of my eyelids as I drift off? Buddha Shakyamuni answered it with a musical instrument. The strings of…
What do you think is the goal of meditation? It’s likely that you’ve heard that the object is stillness, quieting the mind. And it’s common for people to be frustrated because the mind doesn’t still easily. Minds wander; it’s what they do naturally. For four weeks now we’ve been working through two lists having to…
In the calm abiding instructions there are eight antidotes to the five things that get in the way. Most striking about the list is its distribution, rather than its length. Four of the eight, half the entire apparatus, go after a single fault. And that fault we call “laziness,” the one that keeps you from…
Sit down to meditate, choose an object, and try to keep your mind on it. For almost everyone, within milliseconds the mind wanders, and we lose concentration. Close behind the wandering comes a verdict: “I can’t do this. I’m not a meditator.“ The tradition is precise about that wandering; that’s a kindness. Rather than one…
When I was young and vacationing at the lake with my parents, I loved searching for crawfish beneath the stones along the shore. I liked the challenge of lifting a rock, catching a glimpse of movement, and following the crawfish as it moved backward through the water. I meant it no harm. I was simply…
Meditation is about training the mind to focus, not to be empty or to simply watch what is happening.
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