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Even if you have established a firm minimum, there may be days when it is physically impossible for you to sit that long.

That doesnt mean that you should just cancel the whole idea for that day.

Incidentally, you decide on the length of your session before you meditate.

Dont do it while you are meditating.

Its too easy to give in to restlessness that way, and restlessness is one of the main items that we want to learn to mindfully observe.

You can use a watch to time your session, but dont peek at it every two minutes to see how you are doing.

Your concentration will be completely lost, and agitation will set in.

Youll find yourself hoping to get up before the session is over.

Dont look at the clock until you think the whole meditation period has passed.

Actually, you dont need to consult the clock at all, at least not every time you meditate.

In general, you should be sitting for as long as you want to sit.

It is best, however, to set yourself a minimum length of time.

If you havent predetermined a minimum, youll find yourself prone to short sessions.

Youll bolt every time something unpleasant comes up or whenever you feel restless.

These experiences are some of the most profitable a meditator can face, but only if you sit through them.

Youve got to learn to observe them calmly and clearly.

When youve done that enough times, they lose their hold on you.

You see them for what they are just impulses, arising and passing away, just part of the passing show.

Your life smoothes out beautifully as a consequence.

It conjures up images of somebody standing over you with a stick, telling you that youre wrong.

They have no power over you.

Your urges scream and bluster at you they cajole they coax they threaten

but they really carry no stick at all.

You give in out of habit.

You give in because you never really bother to look beyond the threat.

The words on this page wont do it.

But look within and watch the stuff coming uprestlessness, anxiety, impatience, painjust watch it come up and dont get involved.

Much to your surprise, it will simply go away.

Set-up Exercises countries, it is traditional to begin each meditation session with the recitation of a certain set of formulas.

An American audience is likely to take one glance at these invocations and to dismiss them as harmless rituals and nothing more.

These so-called rituals, however, have been devised and refined by a set of pragmatic and dedicated men and women, and they have a thoroughly practical purpose.

The Buddha was considered contrary in his own day.

He was born into an intensely ritualized society, and his ideas appeared thoroughly iconoclastic to the established hierarchy of his own era.

On numerous occasions, he disavowed the use of rituals for their own sake, and he was quite adamant about it.

This does not mean that ritual has no use.

It means that ritual by itself, performed strictly for its own sake, will not get you out of the trap.

If you believe that mere recitation of words will save you, then you only increase your own dependence on words and concepts.

This moves you away from the wordless perception of reality rather than toward it.

Therefore, the formulae that follow must be practiced with a clear understanding of what they are and why they work.

They are psychological cleansing devices that require active mental participation in order to be effective.

Mumbled words without intention are useless.

The technique works best in an atmosphere of calm, benevolent confidence.

And these recitations have been designed to foster those attitudes.

Correctly used, they can act as a helpful tool on the path to liberation.

One person battles against enormously powerful forces, part of the very structure of the mind doing the meditating.

When you really get into it, you will eventually find yourself confronted with a shocking realization.

One day you will look inside and realize the full enormity of what you are actually up against.

What you are struggling to pierce looks like a solid wall so tightly knit that not a single ray of light shines through.

You find yourself sitting there, staring at this edifice, and you say to yourself, That am supposed to get past that But its impossible That is all there is.

That is what everything means, and that is what use to define myself and to understand everything around me, and if take that away the whole world will fall apart and will die.

You feel like, Here am, all alone, trying to punch away something so huge it is beyond conception.

To counteract this feeling, it is useful to know that you are not alone.

Others have passed this way before.

They have confronted that same barrier, and they have pushed their way through to the light.

They have laid out the rules by which the job can be done, and they have banded together into a fellowship for mutual encouragement and support.

The Buddha found his way through this very same wall, and after him came many others.

He left clear instructions in the form of the Dhamma to guide us along the same path.

And he founded the Sangha, the community of monks and nuns, to preserve that path and to keep each other on it.

You need courage to confront some pretty difficult mental phenomena and the determination to sit through various unpleasant mental states.

Feel the intention you put into them.

am about to tread the very same path that has been walked by the Buddha and by his great and holy disciples.

An indolent person cannot follow that path.

It is a procedure in which the ego will be eradicated by the penetrating gaze of mindfulness.

The practitioner begins this process with the ego in full command of mind and body.

Then, as mindfulness watches the ego function, it penetrates to the roots of the mechanics of ego and extinguishes ego piece by piece.

If we start with ego in full control, how do we put enough mindfulness there at the beginning to get the job started There is always some mindfulness present in any moment.

The real problem is to gather enough of it to be effective.

To do this we can use a clever tactic.

We can weaken those aspects of ego that do the most harm so that mindfulness will have less resistance to overcome.

To the extent that grasping and rejecting are present in the mind, mindfulness will have a very rough time.

The results of this are easy to see.

If you sit down to meditate while you are in the grip of some strong obsessive attachment, you will find that you will get nowhere.

If you are all hung up in your latest scheme to make more money, you probably will spend most of your meditation period doing nothing but thinking about it.

If you are in a black fury over some recent insult, that will occupy your mind just as fully.

There is only so much time in one day, and your meditation minutes are precious.

It is best not to waste them.

The Theravada tradition has developed a useful tool that will allow you to remove these barriers from your mind at least temporarily, so that you can get on with the job of removing their roots permanently.

You can use one idea to cancel another.

You can balance a negative emotion by instilling a positive one.

Giving is the opposite of greed.

Understand clearly now this is not an attempt to liberate yourself by autohypnosis.

liberated person will indeed be generous and benevolent, but not because she has been conditioned to be so.

She will be so purely as a manifestation of her own basic nature, which is no longer inhibited by ego.

If you take this medicine according to directions, it will bring temporary relief from the symptoms of the malady from which you are currently suffering.

Then you can get to work in earnest on the illness itself.

You start out by banishing thoughts of self-hatred and self-condemnation.

You allow good feelings and good wishes first to flow to yourself, which is relatively easy.

Then you do the same for those people closest to you.

Gradually, you work outward from your own circle of intimates until you can direct a flow of those same emotions to your enemies and to all living beings everywhere.

Correctly done, this can be a powerful and transformative exercise in itself.

At the beginning of each meditation session, say the following sentences to yourself.

May no harm come to me.

May no difficulties come to me.

May no problems come to me.

May no harm come to them.

May no difficulties come to them.

May no problems come to them.

May they always meet with success.

May they also have patience, courage, understanding, and determination to meet and overcome inevitable difficulties, problems, and failures in life.

May no harm come to them.