How to do Mindfulness Meditation

By Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche

Mindfulness is essential to spiritual practice, for no matter what spiritual tradition we follow, we must have a mind that is able to stay in the present moment if our understanding and experience is to deepen. I would like to talk about some aspects of the actual mindfulness practice.

In mindfulness, or shamatha, meditation, we are trying to achieve a mind that is stable and calm. What we begin to discover is that this calmness or harmony is a natural aspect of the mind. Through mindfulness practice we are just developing and strengthening it, and eventually we are able to remain peacefully in our mind without struggling. Our mind naturally feels content.

An important point is that when we are in a mindful state, there is still intelligence. It's not as if we blank out. Sometimes people think that a person who is in deep meditation doesn't know what's going on-that it's like being asleep. In fact, there are meditative states where you deny sense perceptions their function, but this is not the accomplishment of shamatha practice.

Creating a Favorable Environment
There are certain conditions that are helpful for the practice of mindfulness. When we create the right environment it's easier to practice.

It is good if the place where you meditate, even if it's only a small space in your apartment, has a feeling of upliftedness and sacredness. It is also said that you should meditate in a place that is not too noisy or disturbing, and you should not be in a situation where your mind is going to be easily provoked into anger or jealousy or other emotions. If you are disturbed or irritated, then your practice is going to be affected.

Beginning the Practice
I encourage people to meditate frequently but for short periods of time-ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes. If you force it too much the practice can take on too much of a personality, and training the mind should be very, very simple. So you could meditate for ten minutes in the morning and ten minutes in the evening, and during that time you are really working with the mind. Then you just stop, get up, and go.

Often we just plop ourselves down to meditate and just let the mind take us wherever it may. We have to create a personal sense of discipline. When we sit down, we can remind ourselves: "I'm here to work on my mind. I'm here to train my mind." It's okay to say that to yourself when you sit down, literally. We need that kind of inspiration as we begin to practice.

Posture
The Buddhist approach is that the mind and body are connected. The energy flows better when the body is erect, and when it's bent, the flow is changed and that directly affects your thought process. So there is a yoga of how to work with this. We're not sitting up straight because we're trying to be good schoolchildren; our posture actually affects the mind.

People who need to use a chair for meditation should sit upright with their feet touching the ground. Those using a meditation cushion such as a zafu or gomden should find a comfortable position with legs crossed and hands resting palm-down on your thighs. The hips are neither rotated forward too much, which creates tension, nor tilted back so you start slouching. You should have a feeling of stability and strength.

When we sit down the first thing we need to do is to really inhabit our body-really have a sense of our body. Often we sort of prop ourselves up and pretend we're practicing, but we can't even feel our body; we can't even feel where it is. Instead, we need to be right here. So when you begin a meditation session, you can spend some initial time settling into your posture. You can feel that your spine is being pulled up from the top of your head so your posture is elongated, and then settle.

The basic principle is to keep an upright, erect posture. You are in a solid situation: your shoulders are level, your hips are level, your spine is stacked up. You can visualize putting your bones in the right order and letting your flesh hang off that structure. We use this posture in order to remain relaxed and awake. The practice we're doing is very precise: you should be very much awake even though you are calm. If you find yourself getting dull or hazy or falling asleep, you should check your posture.

Gaze
For strict mindfulness practice, the gaze should be downward focusing a couple of inches in front of your nose. The eyes are open but not staring; your gaze is soft. We are trying to reduce sensory input as much as we can. People say, "Shouldn't we have a sense of the environment?" but that's not our concern in this practice. We're just trying to work with the mind and the more we raise our gaze, the more distracted we're going to be. It's as if you had an overhead light shining over the whole room, and all of a sudden you focus it down right in front of you. You are purposefully ignoring what is going on around you. You are putting the horse of mind in a smaller corral.

Breath
When we do shamatha practice, we become more and more familiar with our mind, and in particular we learn to recognize the movement of the mind, which we experience as thoughts. We do this by using an object of meditation to provide a contrast or counterpoint to what's happening in our mind. As soon as we go off and start thinking about something, awareness of the object of meditation will bring us back. We could put a rock in front of us and use it to focus our mind, but using the breath as the object of meditation is particularly helpful because it relaxes us.

As you start the practice, you have a sense of your body and a sense of where you are, and then you begin to notice the breathing. The whole feeling of the breath is very important. The breath should not be forced, obviously; you are breathing naturally. The breath is going in and out, in and out. With each breath you become relaxed.

Thoughts
No matter what kind of thought comes up, you should say to yourself, "That may be a really important issue in my life, but right now is not the time to think about it. Now I'm practicing meditation." It gets down to how honest we are, how true we can be to ourselves, during each session.

Everyone gets lost in thought sometimes. You might think, "I can't believe I got so absorbed in something like that," but try not to make it too personal. Just try to be as unbiased as possible. Mind will be wild and we have to recognize that. We can't push ourselves. If we're trying to be completely concept-free, with no discursiveness at all, it's just not going to happen.

So through the labeling process, we simply see our discursiveness. We notice that we have been lost in thought, we mentally label it "thinking"-gently and without judgment-and we come back to the breath. When we have a thought-no matter how wild or bizarre it may be-we just let it go and come back to the breath, come back to the situation here.

Each meditation session is a journey of discovery to understand the basic truth of who we are. In the beginning the most important lesson of meditation is seeing the speed of the mind. But the meditation tradition says that mind doesn't have to be this way: it just hasn't been worked with.

What we are talking about is very practical. Mindfulness practice is simple and completely feasible. And because we are working with the mind that experiences life directly, just by sitting and doing nothing, we are doing a tremendous amount.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche is holder of the Buddhist and Shambhala lineages of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He has received teachings from many of the great Buddhist masters of this century, including Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Penor Rinpoche and his father Trungpa Rinpoche. In 1995 he was recognized as the incarnation of the great nineteenth-century Buddhist teacher Mipham Rinpoche.

Originally published in the January 2000 issue of Shambhala Sun.

“Who Is To Blame?” by Nev Sagiba

ECGMA says: Members in the non-MA (martial arts) group must be wondering why this article is shared with them too. To them, I tell them, MA is not about fighting but a way of life. The article by Nev Sagiba sensei is not only applicable to martial artists but also to people in general.

The vilest people in the world revel in blame, making excuses, finger pointing and passing the buck, gossip and throwing mud. In so doing they slowly and eventually destroy themselves, but sadly also do a lot of harm on the way. I've known of instructors who after inflicting injury on a student, then try to make the victim feel at fault.

If there is any injury in the dojo, who is to blame, the instructor or the victim?

Blame is the wrong word. The word blame is a word used by misfits, the morally weak, politicians and anyone striving to hard to distance themselves from their responsibility of harm done.

Responsibility is the correct word because all relationships are symbiotic affairs. No one exists who can exist without others, nature and the universe and its laws of existence.

In the long term blame weakens the blamer most of all, whereas responsibility empowers you to take responsibility for correcting your contribution in all matters.

In any situation, including the dojo, the senior person is entirely responsible for everything that happens and should be held accountable. Or he should step down and relinquish his undeserved ranking, as being inadequate and incompetent to hold such responsible position, if he can't or won't maintain the highest standards of respect and safety. So also in any field of service such as a government or any other organisation.

But, as we know, that's not what happens. Misfits will cling to undeserved position, undeserved wealth and a host of undeserved privileges , which when not earned are stolen.

If you get attacked who is to blame, you or the attacker?

In the field or street or wherever you may be attacked in any way, shape or form, unless you are a child whose protectors failed in their responsibility, YOU as a purporting to be functional adult, and only YOU, are responsible for the attack. And its outcome.

There are no victims.

Blaming the attacker may balm the ego and help your denial, but it will not empower you to act, to prevent future incidents and to take charge.

Let me put it this way. You are the captain of your ship and navigator of your life and security procedures are as necessary a part of life as hygiene, nutrition, knowing how to swim, fire safety, driving ability, knowing how to cook, clean and be aware of your surroundings.

As a navigator, it is you who focuses on your goals and choose where you go, how you travel, how you enact safety and security process.

Otherwise you live unconsciously and take your chances. That too is your choice.

Inconvenient as this may sound in a society of litigious laggards, the laws of nature remain uncompromising. Get it right or face the consequences.

Wildebeest can't sue lions for eating them but they could learn to use their horns a bit better to survive.

Opinions are all good but nature does not listen. She has her ways of processing energy that have worked for billions of years.

It is up to us to make the adjustments that will best uplift the circumstances of humanity in which we are inevitable participants.

At least to have a go.

In this happy, fragile bubble we like to call "humanity" and "civilisation," we can to some extent modify the rules of survival at a more cerebral level whilst interacting in agreed paradigms.

However when it comes to rock bottom, nature, in the processes of creation, carries certain requirements of attrition which must be known, understood, observed and at times, of necessity, applied.

These require that you apply the primal laws of survival if you want to live in the face of what in human construct many may rightly construe as unjust.

Notwithstanding, if we are to navigate well, and in a broader range of circumstances, we are required to expand our understanding through practice.

Such practice enables you to take charge in the face of emergency with some measure of understanding.

Taking responsibility is the essential precursor of enabling you to take charge.

Nobody "blames" an earthquake, flood, tsunami, volcanic eruption, heatwave, cold snap, tornado, landslide and the host of natural sudden changes we as species may find inconvenient.

When insurance companies sought to use the meaningless legal term "Act of God" to default on their responsibility to pay out, following a lightning strike, one guy sued the Catholic Church who after attempting to bury him, promptly sought to distance themselves from this "God" fellow they previously claimed to have ownership of. Not surprisingly, suddenly "God" could not be found.

This may have set a precedent and I believe some insurance companies no longer use the disingenuous term "Act of God." Even a semi comedic movie was made about this event.

This whole concept of buck passing and reassigning tort, could open up a Pandora's box of questions and debates about the existence of any deity, whether benign or malign, whose purported intervention or interference would give rise to even more questions about faith, lack of it and a raft of other philosophical questions about riddles about the way we think we see things that raise even more questions regarding observation and knowledge of reality, such as:

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

And;

If a man speaks his mind in a forest and no woman hears him is he still wrong?

But this is not the purpose of this discourse. Rather to notice certain indisputable observations, these being:

Blame and making excuses makes you weak.

Taking responsibility empowers you.

You cannot control forces stronger than yourself. But you can find ways to respond. And you can learn newer, better ways to respond and refine them through regular practice drills and experience.

It's not what's thrown at you but how you respond that determines outcomes and whether you get to preserve your integrity. By integrity I mean all of it, including the structure of particles, atoms, molecules, cells and parts that go into making you and making you whole. And keeping you alive in the face of adversity.

So also mental clarity and a recognition of oneness with all others in life and the responsibility to participate in pulling our weight in contributing to the greater wellbeing.

By taking responsibility and by responding as constructively as we know how, we participate in bringing about great good and a lessening of otherwise bitter and crushing struggles.

It never ceases to astound me how a dysfunctional generation in a long line of self serving war makers, pillagers and environmental destroyers, then have the temerity to refuse to look into a mirror and accept their contribution to the failure and dysfunction that resulted from their various efforts. Instead many hurl toxic blame at the younger generation they produced in a frenzy of no doubt, irresponsible, inebriated lust. Where is the deliberate and responsible parenting that defines our true humanity?

There is no escape from life, nor can there be a sitting on the fence. We are nolens volens, obliged to meet each day as it is. We can blame the day for being as it is, but that will prove an exercise in futility.

Practicing Budo in order to get into a fight is a pretty dumb goal. A sane person avoids fights unless there is no alternative than to fight in order to survive.

Budo has a far greater purpose, in particular an authentic approach to Aikido, and that is to enhance you as a valid and useful human being who can augment the ability to, in some way, add to the greater harmony of the whole world.

To meet life with skill and a responsible intent, unleashes a greater dimension of being that nourishes greater potentials and begins to expand the power of possibility.

Such is the nature of all Budo and its ultimate creative purpose.

Nev Sagiba
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