Body calming meditation, before breath meditation

I admit, I've not been very consistent recently due to frequent travel, changing time zones, and other work-imposed changes. While I tried to meditate as and when I could, the degree of focus isn't the same as I'm mentally and physically so bloody tired... More than once, I closed my eyes en-route to a meeting, only to wake up with my head slouched on my chest and drool on my belly.

This afternoon, though, I was able to meditate for about 45 minutes, with ever increasing mindfulness, without any will or mental "force" required to focus. Instead, the focus happened quite naturally.

How did that happen?  Rather than directly focusing on the breath and forcing the mind to zoom in on a subtle object, I started with body calming meditation, before proceeding to breath meditation. This has a few advantages:
a. You allow your mind to go naturally from the large & course sensations (e.g. body aches) to the refined & subtle (e.g. sensation of the breath).
b. You are constantly in the present moment, which helps remove the larger impediments to mindfulness (e.g. thinking about past and future).
c. There is no force required, as you don't have to force your mind to focus.

The keys here are to ensure that you are comfortable, and to be kindful: kind and mindful. It's ok if your mind drifts and starts thinking about something else; just remind (and not beat) yourself, and go back to your meditation object. The best part about starting with body calming meditation is: if you are constantly distracted at the breath meditation stage, you can always go back to focusing on your body.

Meditation instructions

1. Ensure that you are physically comfortable. It took me a few minutes of adjusting the meditation cushion (I meditate on a buckwheat shell pillow, as I've a big ass that gets numb on the round zazen cushions). I also used a comfortable eye-cover, to prevent getting distracted by light. 
2. After settling down, focus first on your toes, shins, and came to be aware of the sensations there. If there was any tension, I mentally asked "What do you, body part, really want?" then I let it go. If needed, I mindfully shifted my body part to be comfortable. There was a point when a certain body part was actually painful: I focused on it, and was just kind to it mentally saying "may you, body part, be well and happy". It helps to feel towards it as you would towards a pet or something loveable. 
3. From the lower parts of the body, gradually and systematically move upwards, ending with the top of your head. For each body part, it was a case of letting the part be, being kindful, paying attention to it and being in the present moment, and letting it be comfortable.
4. The order of the body calmness "sweep" can also be altered: no hard and fast rules here. 
5. [A note about distractions: they happen. While I was mostly in the present moment, there were times when my mind lapsed into the past and future, and I had random thoughts (including about my career). The important thing isn't to bring your mind back or to scold yourself, but just note that you aren't focusing on what you're supposed to, and to remind yourself on the original focus object.]  
6. At the end of this "body sweep", when your mind is alert, peaceful and also quite in the present moment and when your body feels quite peaceful and calm, the only moving thing should be your breathing. Quite naturally, let your mind focus on the breath. It also helps to instruct your mind three times "Focus on the the beginning and end of the breath" and let it be. (This is called "setting up the gatekeeper", and is basically auto-suggestion.) 
7. After some time, with each in-breath, you can mentally note "peace", and exhale (mentally noting) "let go". It has a certain hypnotic effect, as with each breath, you're basically instructing your mind to keep letting go.
8. Eventually, you can focus on the entire breath, from inhalation to exhalation to the pause between breaths. The breath should get smoother and smoother.
9. To end the breathing meditation, mentally ask yourself if you enjoyed the experience, and what was the positive part of the experience? Then intentionally note at least three inhalation-exhalations (without force or intention) before opening your eyes. 

When I ended the meditation, it was very pleasant and calm, and my mind was alert and in the present moment. It wasn't quite at the "beautiful breath" stage that Ajahn Brahm speaks of, but it was perhaps at the brink of it. No nimittas or bright lights too. 

It's important not to force yourself or try too hard, but to just let things be and to be kind. If you are too tired, then go sleep for a bit before sitting again. Be kind with yourself. :)

Have a good Sunday and week ahead. 

The Hindrances: Sloth and Torpor

The most common "problems" in meditation are one of the five hindrances:

1. Sensual desire 
2. Anger/ill will
3. Sloth and Torpor
4. Restlessness
5. Doubt

I will talk a bit about each of these in due course. Today I will focus on Sloth and Torpor.

For me, sloth and torpor is one of the most frequent friends that I meet on this path, a bit like an old friend with a drinking problem. You know this friend, and you know the problem, but it can be so hard to do something about it! 

How can one overcome this? In some of the suttas, the Buddha mentions pressing one's tongue to your palate, and beating your mind down. If you try it, you'll realise that this simply causes you to oscillate between tiredness and extreme restlessness (I personally didn't believe this until I witnessed it in myself during a retreat). 

Usually, tiredness has a mental and physical cause. Often, we simply don't realise just how tired we are, especially in this day and age where sensory overstimulation is the norm. The Buddha compared sensual pleasures to a debt, which you have to pay back: when we sit down and meditate and our minds become overwhelmed with tiredness, this is mental-payback time for all the times you were nonstopsurfingonyourphonetalkingwhileeatingplayingonegameafteranotherlisteningtomusicwhileworkingoutetc. 

The solution really is to either rest, or allow yourself while meditating to rest: just kindfully (yes, kindly + mindful) let your mind be even if it is dulled with fatigue. If it is really unbearable, then lie down to rest: after all, that was also part of the advice that the Buddha gave to Mahamogallana (one of his two chief disciples) when the latter was fighting fatigue on his path to arahantship. It is also what my teacher Ajahn Brahm cheekily calls "flat out meditation". 

After some rest, usually you'll find it is much easier to sustain attention on the meditation object. When mindfulness builds up, usually sloth and torpor naturally falls away by itself. 

Another thing that helps in your daily life is to meditate more regularly, and to simplify your life by removing craving for things and stimuli. This helps overall.

Restarting this blog: Changes since 2010

It's been quite sometime since I last updated this blog. Since then, a couple of things have happened.

I intend to rejig and post regularly on this blog again. The intent is to share on my personal path and journey of the Dhamma, and to share some approaches & solutions to some meditation problems. I hope this could turn out to be useful to some readers out there, whoever that is.

But what were the couple of things that happened....?

In 2010, I went for my first meditation retreat with Ajahn Brahmavamso, organised by the Singapore Buddhist Fellowship, and meant for working executives. This retreat changed my life in a few important ways:

a.  I gave up drinking alcohol, and have been keeping the Five Precepts (including not killing mosquitoes) since. (As a consequence, I've not been that close to some friends whom I knew from my wine-drinking days. I guess people grow apart with different interests.)

The story behind the decision: just before we reached the retreat venue, I had this sudden craving for a Chang beer. However, I was bound by the retreat rules not to drink any alcohol at all until after the retreat.

After the retreat, I found that I had completely given up all desire for alcohol. I reflected on it, and decided that while I do like the flavours of certain types of beverages (e.g. Riesling wine), the main reason I drank was conditioning. Also, I like it when people loosen up with alcohol: usually I don't need any alcohol to loosen up, though.

There was also the fact that alcohol consumption dulls the mind. From the retreat, I felt it was much, much, much more fun to meditate than to imbibe.

Some of my colleagues started joking that I had become a monk after the retreat. They weren't aware that I very seriously considered that possibility.

b. I started meditating much more regularly. This was the first retreat which really "hooked" me on meditation. In the middle of the retreat, Ajahn mentioned that the experience of samadhi causes the mind to "leap towards meditation", which was exactly what happened. (One morning, I was so enthused that I went to the meditation hall at 4am, only to find that the a/c wasn't turned on at all.)

Nowadays, I meditate whenever I am travelling in the car (I have a driver, since I'm based in India), and try to meditate for at least 20 mins everyday. On Sundays, I try to keep it free and to meditate & nap as much as I can.

c. The way I (try to) meditate now is quite different, too. Ajahn Brahm's method is VERY different from the other meditation teachers I've encountered. He likes to say that there are two types of meditation: 2nd Noble Truth meditation (craving creates suffering) and 3rd Noble Truth meditation (cessation of that craving). He also likes to say that wisdom-power is more effective than will-power. And to focus on applying kindfulness (mindfulness with kindness).

The 2010 retreat really opened my eyes to the power of mindfulness and letting go.

d. After this retreat, I consider my Dhamma teachers to be the Buddha and Ajahn Brahm, and was fortunate enough to subsequently introduce Ajahn (who is still alive) to my parents and wife (then my girlfriend).

This has had a very beneficial effect on my personal relationships: my parents relationship has arguably become much better, and my relationship with my wife has also really been reinforced by the Dhamma (especially after our latest 2014 retreat).

That said, I do sometimes have to be careful not to hard-sell Ajahn Brahm too often, which my wife repeatedly reminds me.

e. On Ajahn Brahm's advice (during the return flight, when we ended up sharing the same flight and were on the same row), I started reading the suttas directly, especially the Majjhima Nikaya (Middle Length Discourses) translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi.

I also started to download Ajahn Brahm's podcasts, including his sutta talks. His talks are quite enlightening: his mastery of Pali is very thorough, as he was one of the first Westerner monks to translate the Vinaya (Monastic discipline) from the original Pali into English. As such, his grasp of Pali is somewhat street-savvy & pragmatic, and not overly academic. For example, the Eighth factor of the Eightfold Path (samma samadhi) is often mistranslated as right concentration: Ajahn points out that it's more helpful to translate it as right stillness, especially since samatha (calming, tranquility) is etymologically linked to samadhi.

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I still strongly respect my first meditation teacher, Richard (Vajiro). I will always be grateful and appreciative to him for having introduced me to the Dhamma, and to basic meditation. For those who are interested, he still runs his Basic Buddhism Course (the other BBC).

Session 1: Uncle Richard, course introduction, and meditative experience

Purpose
The purpose of this blog is to catalogue my experiences in the Basic Meditation Course from 12 July 2009 to 22 November 2009, organized by Vajiro (Richard) Chia.

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Uncle Richard

Uncle Richard (as I call him) is actually a distant relative of mine: he is the brother-in-law of my auntie (阿姨), but I actually really came into contact with him when I first attended the Meditation Appreciation Course (which is now defunct) at Awareness Place (at Bras Brasah) back in 2002. In that very short course, I learnt the basics of Buddhist meditation from Uncle Richard, and under his guidance, also experienced jhana (more on this in future postings). He also opened my eyes to how pragmatic and practical Buddhism is, under the Theravada tradition; it was under his guidance that I had an "ah ha" moment, when it became clear to me that Buddhism was my "religion" (if a religion that has no god, no soul and no dogma can be called such).

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Personal Dhamma Experiences

My meditation learning was interrupted by my four years of tertiary education in the US, where I tried to find a teacher that will replace Uncle Richard. Try as I might, I never really found a teacher who combined extensive meditation experience and a realistic pragmatism which Uncle Richard has. (To date, I have not found a single teacher who teaches jhana like Uncle Richard, largely because this type of Buddhist meditation is very rarely taught and most monks have not been trained in this.) This was partially because in Houston, where I was, most Buddhists were Tibetan or Chinese Mahayana Buddhists, and not Theravada (which is the tradition Uncle Richard comes from).

I experimented with the other traditions of Buddhism, and while I found a common language of compassion, and a common practice of breath meditation, the direct "see for yourself" and logical reasoning found in Theravada Buddhism still appealed to me in a way that other traditions did not. There was also no guidance in the subtle meditative absorptions, which really need guidance by experienced meditators. Unfortunately, the sole Sri Lankan temple in Houston did not have monks who were experienced meditators (their focus seemed to be more on abhidhamma, or Buddhist doctrine), and there were no other Theravada temples that I knew of in Houston, then.

Despite this, I took refuge in a Chinese Buddhist temple in Houston, where my Chinese dhamma name is 慧喜 ('wisdom-happiness'), which the venerable explained means "to bring happiness to others with your wisdom".

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My S.N. Goenka's Vipassana course experience

I haphazardly meditated on my own through the years, with a highlight being the period when I went for a 10-day vipassana ("insight" or "wisdom" meditation) retreat in Dharamshala, India, where I was taught the basic method as outlined by S.N. Goenka and his teacher Sayagi U Ba Khin, which is increasingly widely taught in India.

My memories of the 10 days (in the middle of the Indian monsoon at the Himalayan foothills) were of extreme cold and damp (it rained everyday), with a very mixed group of people in the retreat (there were two Sikhs, at least one Muslim, two Japanese, a number of Europeans and a lot of Israelis: in fact, the video of the nightly dhamma talk given by Goenka-ji [shown every night] had subtitles in Hebrew!) I distinctly remember a few afternoons when we were trying to meditate and to stay awake (a challenge when you are jet-lagged and your daily wake-up call is at 4am), only to have some random farmer down in the valley turn on his radio, and we would end up trying to meditate to Bollywood bhangra music!

The meditation was initially focused on the breath, ranging from whole body, and then later to the very subtle sensations above the lip. Later we then moved to vipassana. After a few days of it, it was a very weird feeling of watching my body so closely and with such concentration that my body was no longer concrete, but was bubbling and vibrating. It was also during this time that all body pains disappeared: for the rest of my retreat, I was no longer bothered by any pains at all, even if I sat for two hours straight. When I told Uncle Richard about this, he informed me that it was just the one stage of vipassana: there were further levels of insight, going beyond insight from body sensations. I was far from enlightened (as I can tell, from my cravings!)

But the course was still a milestone for me, as it proved that 10 days of complete silence is really not as bad as one thinks, even if one is suffering from the cold and wet, and having constant diarrhoea.

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Meditation Restart

Now that I am back in Singapore, I've signed up for the Basic Meditation Course and intend to stick to this discipline of structured instruction in meditation. It helps that the course is on Sunday afternoons, rather than mornings, as it is easier to wake up for!

The session first opened with an offering session on the 2nd floor of the temple, where we basically did a puja to the Triple gems (Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha), and chanted in Pali. We then went upstairs to the fourth floor, where Uncle Richard gave some course background (the aim is to "avoid bad states of the mind, cultivate good states of the mind, and purify the mind") and course instructions (proper dress, etc.).

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Course Outline

The focus will be on four different types of Buddhist meditation (with the aims of the meditation after the dash):

1. Loving-kindness meditation (metta bhavana) - to reduce aversion
2. Contemplations on Impurities of the body (kayagata sati bhavana) - to reduce attachment to the body
3. Concentration meditation (samatha bhavana) - to train the mind to focus and concentrate
4. Vipassana, or insight meditation (vipassana bhavana) - to gain insight and wisdom in order to be enlightened

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Natural Breathing

Before all of this, however, the class today was focused on teaching one how to relax and breathe naturally.

Sitting on our chairs, we looked on the floor and closed our eyes "as though (we were) about to fall asleep", focusing on relaxing and letting go of the stress in our eyes. This simple act, of looking down and closing your eyes as though you were about to go to sleep, overcomes a frequent problem I had in past meditations: I'd try to relax and focus on my breathing, but would get too distracted by my eyes fluttering about as though it wants to see through my eyelids. Uncle Richard explained that if you look straight ahead, then look down on the floor, and you compare the amount of effort and strain that you experience when you're looking ahead or on the floor, you can feel that looking down relaxes your eyes and subsequently your mind a lot more.

After closing the eyes, the focus is then on letting your internal organs relax. This cannot really be described in writing, but has to be taught by an experienced meditator like Uncle Richard (he taught it to me by placing my hand on his tummy, which was a pretty eye-opening experience, as you can feel his insides relax even though the exterior looks exactly the same).

A good analogy that a fellow student-meditator (in Germany) taught me is to imagine your skeletal structure as a clothes rack, held upright (but not rigidly). Then let your muscles and organs hang off the rack. Let go. Mentally go through your body from head to toe, and ask if a body part is tense or not. If it is tense, let it go. "Let your body dissolve"

How do you know whether you have relaxed sufficiently? You know, when your whole body begins to breathe without your conscious effort to tell yourself to breathe in or out. Uncle Richard refers to this as a gentle "vibration". For me, the feeling is very similar to the gentle-rocking one feels when onboard a ship, only that it is a lot more subtle. So subtle, in fact, that the rocking sensation of natural breathing is sometimes overwhelmed with the "thud, thud, thud" from my heartbeat.

A few minutes of this, and it is makes a huge difference to one's energy level.

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Contemplation of the Impurities of the Body meditation

We proceeded onto the Contemplation of the Impurities of the Body meditation, where Uncle Richard taught us to mentally disassemble our bodies bit by bit, like Lego blocks. He told us not to "rationalize or over-imagine: don't imagine blood spurting out or feeling intense pain when you take out your hair, teeth, bones, etc. ".

Interestingly, when I did the meditation as instructed, initially my body became quite tensed up, and you can feel a pulsing energy around the body part which is being mentally removed ("now, pull out your hair, one by one". Note that you are not told to "imagine"!). After my whole body was 'removed', it was interesting that my breathing was there, but it felt like my body was not there! Instead, there was a vibrating pulsing energy, much like in natural breathing. When we concluded the meditation, I felt very awake and energized, as though I had slept a very deep and refreshing sleep. Very interesting (and useful).

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As time goes by, I will update this with my meditation experiences as a running commentary and diary. Your comments and feedback are most welcome!

[Disclaimer: Please note that everyone's meditation experience is going to be different. If you are sufficiently intrigued by this blogpost, please don't hesitate to sign up for the meditation course or the beginner's course here, but please don't try this on your own without proper guidance.]