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There are two parts to incorporating joy into exercise. The first is a skillful ramp-up, which means that at the beginning, you put the trainee onto the exercise regimen skillfully. At this stage, the key is easing into it, skillfully.
The second part of incorporating joy into exercise is making it fun.
There is a point in every meditator’s practice that I imaginatively call the Joy Point. This is the point where the meditator gains reliable access to inner peace and inner joy, at least during meditation.
The first step in applying joy to meditation is easing. This is where you ease into practice and arrive at the realization that meditation does not have to be hard. In fact, it can actually be quite easy. As you settle into ease, a sense of joy arises that is born of ease, and when abiding in that joy, the mind relaxes some more and ease becomes more firmly established, thus creating a virtuous cycle. This is how easing is the first step to establishing and applying joy in meditation.
it takes no more than a hundred hours of practice before a meditator begins to experience benefits that are significant enough to be life changing.
a hundred minutes of meditation training is sufficient to effect measurable changes.
students who practiced mindfulness meditation for ten minutes a day for two weeks, a total of 140 minutes, had measurably improved GRE scores.
meditation takes a long time to master, but it is very easy to learn and it takes only a short amount of time for meditation to start changing your life. In that sense, meditation obeys an aphorism called Bushnell’s Law, named after Nolan Bushnell, founder of the video games company Atari. Bushnell’s Law states, “All the best games are easy to learn and difficult to master.”
You may close your eyes or keep them open. Take one slow, deep breath. For the duration of that one breath, give your full attention to your breath in a gentle way. Total and gentle attention on feeling your breath, that is all. If you prefer a more specific instruction, bring attention to the feeling in either your nose or your belly as you breathe.
To feel regretful, you need to be in the past, and to worry, you need to be in the future. Hence, when you are fully in the present, you are temporarily free from regret and worry.
for those wishing to optimize its benefits, for that one breath to work very well, it is good to have generous helpings of two key ingredients: gentleness in attitude, and intensity of attention. Attending with intensity and gentleness is like gazing at your baby or the way your puppy looks at you. The attention is intense but also gentle and effortless.
Put yourself in a situation that is physically relaxing for you.
When you feel relaxed, pay attention to this feeling so that your mind becomes familiar with it. Where there is relaxation, gentleness follows.
Remember that meditation can be easy. You’re not doing anything in particular, you are simply noticing the breath, which happens by itself anyway. Even better, you are doi...
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There is nowhere to go, nothing to do, no g...
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See if there is any way you can bring up loving-kindness, by applying it either to yourself, to the experience of the breath, or to the present moment. Alternatively, call up a memory involving an abundance of loving-kindness and enjoy that memory before doing the One Mindful Breath meditation. When the mind is immersed in loving-kindness, gentleness follows.
One subject biked at a speed he could sustain for thirty minutes a day. The other biked intensely for merely one minute a day, going all out for twenty seconds until he was exhausted, resting for a few minutes, and then going all out again. He did this three times, for a total training time of one minute. Weeks later, they both achieved the same improvements
A high level of intensity in meditation is when the object of meditation, in this case the breath, occupies all your foreground attention. The mind may be aware of other phenomena, such as thoughts, sounds, or images, but they are all in the background.
if, for whatever reason, you can only choose one, always choose gentleness over intensity.
The moment you wake up, take one mindful breath and know that you have just been given the gift of another day to live. You can also use the moment you lie down in bed at night as your cue, in which case the mindful breath relaxes you in preparation for a good night’s sleep.
every time you have to wait, take a mindful breath.
once you do this practice often enough that it becomes a habit, you will never be bored anymore because boredom itself becomes a cue. At the first sign of boredom, the mind goes like, “Yay! I get to meditate.” And then the mind just spontaneously engages in meditation. No more boredom.
If taking that mindful breath makes you feel any better, simply notice that. It will be the reward that reinforces the habit.
The first highly sustainable source of joy is the joy of momentary relief from affliction.
Attending gently and intensely to one breath, we find some temporary relief from affliction, and consequently joy arises with that relief.
The second highly sustainable source of joy is the joy of ease.
Part of this joy of ease comes from the ease of the situation, that there is nothing particularly difficult to do at the moment, and the other part comes from being at ease with oneself.
remember that meditation is mental training. That means the intention to do that one breath is itself a meditation, because every time that intention arises, your mind inclines toward doing meditation practice a little bit more.
Once you do one breath a day, you will generate momentum for your practice, and when the day arrives that you are ready to do long sits, the momentum is there for you.”
The simplest, most fundamental, most basic, and most important meditative skill of all is the ability to settle the mind.
The first method is anchoring. This means bringing gentle attention to a chosen object, and if attention wanders away, gently bringing it back.
If anchoring is too hard for you, here is the second method: resting.
to rest the mind, all I do is sit down and allow my mind to relax. One way to rest the mind is to use an image.
use this mantra, “There is nowhere to go and nothing to do for this one moment, except to rest.”
If resting is still too hard for you, here is the third method: being. Being means shifting from doing to being. It means not doing anything in particular, just sitting and experiencing the present moment. You can think of it as non-doing, or sitting without agenda, or simply just sitting. The key ingredient of this practice is being in the present moment. As long as your attention is in the present, you are doing it right.
For one minute, bring gentle attention to the breath,
For the next minute, rest the mind.
For the next minute, shift from doing to being. Sitting without agenda. Just sit and experience the present moment, for the duration of one minute.
I recommend doing the exercise of settling the mind at least once a day, for at least one minute a day.
You have direct control of whether you shake the snow globe or settle it on the table, but you have no direct control over the state of the water and snowflakes in it.
if you desire calm and clear water in the snow globe, you know that you need to settle the snow globe on the table and then allow the laws of physics to do their thing. It is similar with the mind. We really do not have direct control over whether the mind is settled or not, but what we can do is create the conditions conducive to the mind being settled and then allow the mind to take its own time to settle itself.
put effort into creating the right conditions for what you want to happen, and then to let go and allow things to happen (or not happen) on their own.
No, meditation is not about suppressing thoughts. Instead, meditation is about allowing the mind to settle on its own terms, in its own time, which includes allowing thoughts to arise as and when they want to.
Over time (in my own case, after many, many hours of meditation practice), the mind learns to quiet down on demand, but that does not come from suppressing the process of thinking—instead, it comes from learning to give the mind the space and time to settle on its own terms.
The key is to practice equanimous watching, basically just watching yourself while you meditate. If you notice too much tension, then apply mental relaxation, and if you become sleepy, then apply mental energy.
Relaxation is the basic competency in meditation that enables all the others.
“I will attend to every single in-breath and out-breath, not losing attention to a single breath, for thirty minutes.” There was only one rule, the relaxation rule: first and foremost, establish relaxation, and if relaxation breaks, reestablish relaxation. In other words, I would not let the effort stress me out. Anytime I felt stressed out, I would temporarily abandon effort and return to relaxation before reintroducing effort.
notice joy. Whenever there is any joy arising in our field of experience, even if it is merely a subtle hint of joy, simply notice that there is joy, that is all.
Let us take three breaths. In the first breath, bring gentle but intense attention to the process of breathing. In the second breath, calm the body. In the third breath, bring up joy. If necessary, bring up a smile or a half smile, whatever the words half smile mean to you. If any joy arises, bring full attention to it.
a wholesome source of joy is one that is not contaminated with greed, ill will, or the seeds of future suffering. Kindness is a wholesome source of joy, for example,
