Dhamma Practice #1
January 2021, Bangkok
For Westerners, Americans especially, finding someone capable of teaching Dhamma clearly and in good faith is an extremely difficult task. Remembering back to when I first attempted meditation, I would say it took nearly eight years of constant searching, constant attempts at routine building, constantly trying again again after despairing and confusing failures to finally get some semblance of grounding to actually build a healthy practice off of. That may just be me though, as I’m a slow learner, but luckily also very stubborn. At the same time, I had the right people in my life, but my own ignorance and lack of awareness didn’t allow me to choose the more valuable paths. So, what the rest of this piece will describe is some simple framing of basic mindsets, perspectives, and initial practices for the absolute beginner. It’s an attempt to make the kind of brief essay that would have helped me best all those years ago.
First of all—just to be clear—I’m not an expert in meditation. Not even close. This is just how I see things with my years of attempting practice, with my personal experiences, and with straight from the written source Theravada instruction. My point of view would differ from other Buddhist practitioners, even within the sect that I chose (or chose me). That’s an important thing to understand about Buddhism—that it’s a giant world of different understandings and practices, but with some core overlapping principles. Some people respond well to certain forms of Buddhism or certain meditative practices, and this is how they find what works for them. In my own experience, I read a lot of Mahayana and Zen literature early on, but wound up in Thailand—a Theravada country—and I tended to value the abstract reading more than the first hand experience I had with the monks I’d met. What I would suggest now, though, would be to value real life experiences with Buddhism, with practitioners, living examples of the teaching, more so than anything you’ve read about it. While the reading can be helpful for understanding the goals and ideals you want to work toward, the people you meet or listen to are going to be the most inspirational for building a practice that sticks. They are the ones who have integrated what they’ve learned into a living reality.
One of the issues that arises with that, though, is that finding quality practitioners and teachers in real life is rare. Luckily, one of the benefits of the internet is that a lot of Buddhist monks have channels or podcasts that give the world access to their Dhamma talks. One of the main factors that got me onto a healthy practice that has stood the test of time so far was finding Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s Dhamma Talks Youtube channel. Every week or so he uploads the daily Dhamma Talks he gives to the monks at his temple, or to the audience at the temple he is visiting, and a majority of the time they are exactly what I need to hear before meditating. Upon first encountering them, I was in a particularly bad way, both meditatively speaking and just with life in general. So initially I would just sit in a meditation posture while listening to him talk, not even really meditating. Sometimes I’d even listen to them as I was falling asleep (his calm monotone often aids in helping that process). He often emphasizes the very common initial instruction of focusing on the breath. Even though that initial instruction may come across as trite or overdone to some, I would suggest it as the first meditation practice to attempt, if for nothing else because the instruction is easy, but the actual practice is difficult to do correctly. The thing to understand about it is that there will never be a point where you get so good at it that you can feel accomplished. You can grow with focusing on the breath endlessly; there are always ways to improve your focus. The combination of your conscious attention onto the breath as the object of meditation is the vehicle you’ll use to delve deeper into the awareness that you’re meant to cultivate in Buddhist practice. The more you do it, the stronger your penetrative abilities with consciousness will become.
From those first ten minute-or-so sitting sessions while listening to the Dhamma talks, eventually the messages from them began to inspire further sitting after they’d finished. Personally, even after having a pretty good routine established, every meditation app I’ve tried hasn’t meshed well with me. There’s something too robotic and inorganic about them. While I think it’s important to eventually try to increase the duration of a meditation session, time is not the thing to prioritize early on. I personally focused too much on how long my sitting sessions were early on, and it only led to frustration, impatience, and unhealthy self-criticism. Try to, instead, bring your focus back to basic observations about what feelings are manifesting in your physical body, what leads to them, what they lead to, or what thoughts are coming into your head, what leads to them, and what they lead to. If you find yourself too wrapped up in thoughts, always come back to anchor yourself in the breath. This continued returning to the breath is the mental muscle you’re ultimately developing. You may get frustrated with your inability to maintain attention. This is an inevitability; it’s completely natural given our cultural conditioning to continually shift the focus of our attention. But if you simply practice focusing in and coming back to one specific object—ideally the breath—your mind will eventually develop the capabilities of focusing that lead to the numerous benefits of meditation.
The breath is an important object of meditation for a number of reasons. It keeps you in the present moment, for one thing. The mind likes to get lazy by living in the abstract past and the abstract future. It actually has to work to stay in the present—to analyze phenomena as they arise, to see things as they are before cataloging and organizing them into manageable forms. Real focus happens here in this difficult area of the present, and any meaningful development will need to be built off getting comfortable and stable in the present. Another reason the breath is important is because it’s boring. People make boredom out the be the most horrible thing they could possibly experience, and I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that. Any boredom that anyone experiences is simply laziness or restlessness in disguise. Our minds have been conditioned for continued stimulation and when it doesn’t get it, it revolts in something akin to an immature temper tantrum. What we consider ‘boredom’ is actually the gateway to calm, if you can become accustomed to living in that space with the right intentions. When you’re truly calm, you’re able to react more appropriately. In this case, you’ll be able to develop stillness in the face of anything that arises in the mind or in the body. This stillness becomes unwavering, fully conscious stability, and with that achievement the practice only continues to grow in ways you never thought possible.
One more thing about duration. Even though I’d suggest not focusing on timing so much early on in the establishment of a daily routine, there should be a conscious goal of increasing the duration in the long term. If you do 5 minutes a day for a month, try increasing it in a meaningful way the next month, say, up to 15 or twenty minutes. Once you start getting comfortable in your meditative space, it’s time to make it more difficult. Otherwise, it’s very easy to just get sucked into abstract thought about the past, the future, what you want to eat later, etc. Try to stay firm and balanced in an environment of constant adaptability.