Building Mental Discipline

In my practice I utilize a meditation technique I learned from a Shambala centre here in the town in which I live.  I have been practicing there for the last year once a week, and in my home as often as I can.  It teaches a method of sitting meditation where one attempts to attain a state of wakeful awareness.  In the first part of the method the practitioner is seated either cross-legged or kneeling with back straight, shoulders relaxed and arms loose at their sides or on their lap.  The head is placed as if someone had tied a string through the head to the spine and had pulled it up, so as to maintain the straightness of the back, while allowing the head to relax and look straight out.  

From this position we look to our breathing.  Bringing it in through the nose, envisioning it going up through our mind before coming down our backs to our bodies.  It then pools in our lungs, and fills us, before moving up once again to be released through the mouth.  This technique is used at first to get new people comfortable with relaxing through breath control.  I personally find this method quite useful.  We are asked to be mindful of how the air affects us.  Does it meet resistance on its journey?  Does it push things out of its way, or move around blockages we may have stored in our bodies?  If so, note this for contemplation later and continue.

Once we learn to be aware of our breath, and find our peace in it’s rhythm, we begin the meditation.  We begin by looking forward with no specific target, our minds following the ebb and flow of our breath, yet remaining open and un-fixed.  As the thoughts of our busy lives begin to enter this calm space we let them, and understand that it will happen.  We identify it as thinking and let the thought go.  Each time the scene repeats we do it over and over, returning each time to our concentration on our breath.

At first I didn’t understand the purpose of this exercise.  Being a military type of person, I wanted to know, objective, method, and goal.  Give me a diagram or set of orders to follow so I can succeed.  After a hard first three months of going each week to the centre, and having the occasional meeting with my meditation coach, frustration written on my face and body, I was almost at the point where quitting could have been an option.  It was then that the first revelation came… “But that is not how meditation works”.

 As I look back over many frustrating attempts at meditation I now see that the problem in all the cases was, me… I was blocking my success.  I was spending too much time worrying if I was getting it right, and looking for some measurable result that I was literally cluttering up my mind.  I decided to start again from the beginning, but this time… just follow the method and see where it took me.  Each week I would meditate 2 to three times a week.  Thankfully it was summer vacation at the time and I had the time to attempt this.  Each time I would increase my sitting for 10 more minutes.  My coach had said that many attempt to do this but have difficulty with the sitting for so long.  In my case for some reason every increase in time was met without problem.

My second revelation came when in month 6, I had reached the point where I was sitting for a two-hour stretch at a time, without interruption.  When I had finished the session, I arose and went to get some water.  My wife was in the other room and when she asked how it went I said… “Oh you know… the usual.”  But it wasn’t.  While getting some water I realized that some things had in fact changed.  My voice had softened, my mannerisms relaxed, and I was not in any great hurry to tackle the projects I saw about me in the home, as I normally would have.  So what changed… well I did of course.  While still thinking I did not understand the exercise or practice, or that perhaps I just couldn’t meditate, I had achieved the first milestone to a small extent.  

In simply sitting in that room concentrating on my breath I had managed to let go of the thoughts that normally swirl through my mind.  The clutter, the demons I allowed to manifest out of my own doubts and misgivings, the fears, and the insane amount of thoughts born out of society’s need to go faster and faster to produce more and more.  Suddenly I realized that these were gone… at least for the moment.  With them gone something else came in to replace it…. Silence.  My mind was quiet and still.

Over the months since I have kept my meditation to about 45 minute sessions, and the occasional 2 hour one thrown in.  I have also begun to use walking meditation with some positive results.  In this form of meditation I walk in a very slow and methodical manner, while concentrating on the breath and the feel of each step.  It still uses the same method of acknowledging thoughts as they enter the mind but labelling them as thinking and allowing them to pass without becoming a focus.  

The periods of calm stillness and clarity of thought that I gain from these meditations seem to be lasting longer and longer, and allowing me to become accustomed to them.  Perhaps in some level retraining my mind to remember what this stillness feels like and creating muscle memory of this stillness so I can sink back into it in those moments when I am not meditating.