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Whatever it is, let it arise and look at it mindfully.

If you just sit still and observe your agitation, it will eventually pass.

It will teach you a lot.

You will find that agitation is actually rather a superficial mental state.

It has no real grip on you at all.

Advanced meditators are generally found to be pretty jovial people.

They possess one of the most valuable of all human treasures, a sense of humor.

They can laugh at their own human failures.

They can chuckle at personal disasters.

It is important to learn to loosen up in your session, to relax in your meditation.

You need to learn to watch objectively whatever happens.

You cant do that if you are tensed and striving, taking it all so very, very seriously.

They jump right in and expect incredible results in no time flat.

They sweat and strain, and it is all so terribly, terribly grim and solemn.

Then they decide that this meditation is not so exciting after all.

It did not give them what they wanted.

It should be pointed out that you learn about meditation only by meditating.

You learn what meditation is all about and where it leads only through direct experience of the thing itself.

Therefore the beginner does not know where he is headed because he has developed little sense of where his practice is leading.

Newcomers to meditation expect all the wrong things, and those expectations do no good at all.

When you are trying too hard, your effort becomes mechanical, and that defeats mindfulness before it even gets started.

You are well advised to drop all that.

The meditation itself will take care of the future.

The upshot of pushing too hard is frustration.

You realize that you are not making the progress you expected, so you get discouraged.

Nevertheless, it is a common enough syndrome and, in spite of all the best advice, you may find it happening to you.

If you find yourself discouraged, just observe your state of mind clearly.

If you get involved, it feeds on your energy and it grows.

If you simply stand aside and watch it, it passes away.

If you are discouraged over your perceived failure in meditation, that is especially easy to deal with.

You feel you have failed in your practice.

You have failed to be mindful.

You have just reestablished your mindfulness with that single step.

But there is no failure unless you give up entirely.

Even if you have spent twenty solid years getting nowhere, you can be mindful at any second you choose.

Regretting is only one more way of being unmindful.

The instant that you realize that you have been unmindful, that realization itself is an act of mindfulness.

There are times when you dont feel like meditating.

Missing a single practice session is scarcely important, but it very easily becomes a habit.

It is wiser to push on through the resistance.

In most cases it is a passing emotion, a flash in the pan that will evaporate right in front of your eyes.

Five minutes after you sit down it is gone.

In other cases it is due to some sour mood that day, and it lasts longer.

And it is better to get rid of it in twenty or thirty minutes of meditation than to carry it around with you and let it ruin the rest of your day.

At other times, resistance may be due to some difficulty you are having with the practice itself.

You may or may not know what that difficulty is.

If the problem is known, handle it by one of the techniques given in this book.

Once the problem is gone, resistance will be gone.

If the problem is unknown, then you are going to have to tough it out.

Then the problem causing it will probably bubble up in its wake, and you can deal with that.

If resistance to meditation is a common feature of your practice, then you should suspect some subtle error in your basic attitude.

Meditation is not a ritual conducted in a particular posture.

It is not a painful exercise, or period of enforced boredom.

It is a new way of seeing and it is a form of play.

Come to regard it as such, and resistance will disappear like smoke on a summer breeze.

If you try all these possibilities and the resistance remains, then there may be a problem.

Certain metaphysical snags that meditators sometimes encounter go beyond the scope of this book.

It is not common for new meditators to hit these, but it can happen.

Seek out qualified teachers of the vipassana style of meditation and ask them to help you resolve the situation.

Such people exist for exactly that purpose.

We have already discussed the sinking mind phenomenon.

But there is a special route to that state you should watch out for.

Mental dullness can result as an unwanted byproduct of deepening concentration.

As your relaxation deepens, muscles loosen and nerve transmissions change.

This produces a very calm and light feeling in the body.

You feel very still and somewhat divorced from the body.

This is a very pleasant state, and at first your concentration is quite good, nicely centered on the breath.

As it continues, however, the pleasant feelings intensify and they distract your attention from the breath.

You start to really enjoy the state and your mindfulness goes way down.

Mindfully observe these phenomena and they will dissipate.

When blissful feelings arise accept them.

They are physical feelings, so treat them as such.

Watch them rise and watch them pass.

You will have problems in meditation.

You can treat them as terrible torments or as challenges to be overcome.

If you regard them as burdens, your suffering will only increase.

If you regard them as opportunities to learn and to grow, your spiritual prospects are unlimited.

Dealing with Distractions every meditator encounters distractions during practice, and methods are needed to deal with them.

Many useful strategies have been devised to get you back on track more quickly than that of trying to push your way through by sheer force of will.

Concentration and mindfulness go hand in hand.

If either one is weak, the other will eventually be affected.

Bad days are usually characterized by poor concentration.

Your mind just keeps floating around.

You need a method of reestablishing your concentration, even in the face of mental adversity.

In fact, you can choose from an array of traditional practical maneuvers.

The first technique has been covered in an earlier chapter.

distraction has pulled you away from the breath, and you suddenly realize that youve been daydreaming.

The trick is to pull all the way out of whatever has captured you, to break its hold on you completely so you can go back to the breath with full attention.

You do this by gauging the length of time that you were distracted.

You dont need a precise figure, just a rough estimate.

You can measure it in minutes, or by significant thoughts.

Just say to yourself, Okay, have been distracted for about two minutes, or since the dog started barking, or since started thinking about money.

When you first start practicing this technique, you will do it by talking to yourself.

Once the habit is well established, you can drop that, and the action becomes wordless and very quick.

The whole idea, remember, is to pull out of the distraction and get back to the breath.

You pull out of the thought by making it the object of inspection just long enough to glean from it a rough approximation of its duration.

Once you are free of the distraction, drop the whole thing and go back to the breath.

When your mind is wild and agitated, you can often reestablish mindfulness with a few quick deep breaths.

This increases the sensation inside the nostrils and makes it easier to focus.

Concentration can be forced into growth, so you will probably find your full attention settling nicely back on the breath.