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Meditation is often thought of as a spiritual exercise, and it is a lot like physical exercise in a number of ways. One way it is similar is that not a lot of people do it! And of those who do, many will not keep on with it unless they have a lot of encouragement and support. The way people make meditation a regular practice is either that they just take to it—similar to the way some people are just naturally athletic—or they work to keep themselves motivated through the phase when it seems like boring drudgery.
But it both cases if you keep with it, it starts to come a little easier. Then if you stop you notice that something doesn’t quite feel right, you don’t feel as good as you did while you were doing it. The regular practice of meditating makes you more aware of how much your mind tends to spin and you really feel that spinning if you stop meditating after having practiced for a while.
Mediation is also like physical exercise in that the Goldilocks principle applies: don’t do it too easy or too hard. With physical exercise, if you do not work hard enough, your body will not benefit, but if you work too hard you can sprain a muscle or hurt yourself. In meditation, too easy would be when you do not make the effort to keep coming back to your focal device and just allow your mind to go off in thinking or daydreaming. Too hard would be trying to force your attention to stay on your focal device, as though the harder you try to keep it focused the more likely you are to achieve something, to experience some kind of flash of insight or enlightenment.
In Zen there is the metaphor of tuning a stringed instrument: if you tighten too much the string snaps; if you do it too easy it is out of tune. Meditation is best when it is a gentle but persistent practice of bringing your mind back to the focus when you discover it has wandered. You are not exercising the part of you that can force attention on something, as though you are studying for an exam, it is the part of you that is aware of the present moment. When you go off into a daydream awareness is being transferred from the present moment into whatever it is you are thinking or imagining and the exercise is to catch that so as to reinforce that part of yourself that is aware, that is awake, that is present to what is really going on.
Sometimes when you exercise you suddenly find yourself capable of doing something—say lifting a certain weight—which you were not capable of before. And in practicing meditation there will be moments when you suddenly shift to a whole different sense of who you are, although you may not notice this until you are tested by difficult situations. You find you respond differently to situations where in the past you would have gotten angry, or held a resentment, or gotten stressed out and anxious. There is a little more calmness in your responses to such situations, a. little more distance from the reactions of your mind so you can respond from a different place. This does not mean you miraculously handle every situation with the patience of Mother Teresa, but you start to notice more of such moments.
More dramatically, there will be moments when you have an uncovering of a deeper sense of something connecting us all, some force of love and compassion that is in all things and working through you. Talking too much about such experiences can set people up to try hard to experience it, and as I said earlier, if you try too hard to make something happen, the kind of thing you are looking for is less likely to happen. This large mind, this sense of awareness, is like the breath in the sense that it is always there, it is always present, it is not something that has to be generated. It is really a matter of being aware of it because it is so subtle it is easy to overlook. This awareness is always present in you for you to be conscious, just like your breath is always present for you to be alive. It is there, it pervades all the other operations of your mind. It is a matter of bringing some of your attention out of that mind stuff back into this deeper sense of life that is always present, that allows you to tap into that more fully.
Alan F. Zundel is a counselor, author, and teacher currently living in Eugene, Oregon. His talks are available to download for free at HeartAwake Center at www.heartawake.org.
Alan F. Zundel is a counselor, author, and teacher currently living in Eugene, Oregon. His talks are available to download for free at HeartAwake Center at 