late night contemplating.

Sensei Ogui, Zen Shin Talks

Prep stages:

1) Take a shower/bath and get all dried off. Put on comfortable loose clothes.

2) Clean your room where you are going to sit. Or go outside to a fairly tidy spot and sit. 

3) Do a basic relaxation exercise like starting with your neck and moving down to your feet of tensing and releasing each muscle group. OR do shaking tree practice to shake tensions out of all your muscles.

4) Make sure you are sitting supported and comfortably. In a chair with your feet slightly raised on a couple books or cross legged on a cushion, or sitting loosely cross legged or kneeling comfortably are all fine.

Actual meditation:

1) Sit for as long as you can. Let your mind run. Don’t indulge it exactly, like don’t start planning a novel, but just sit and let your thoughts come and go as they will. You are literally just letting your mind empty, its full and it has to let all its thoughts out so it can get empty. Do not pursue any of your thoughts. Just let them think and fizzle out.

2) Sit still as you can, but that’s not the main focus. If you have an itch cross your eyes and look right to left. If you still are itching, then scratch and get back to sitting still. If your position you are sitting in hurts, rearrange. If you twitch or can’t keep your hands straight let them fiddle but don’t focus on them. Counting beads like mala beads or a rosary can be good for keeping fidgeting fingers busy.

3) When you are done, like you can’t stand it anymore for whatever reason or you ran out of free time. Get up and congratulate yourself for meditating. This is really all it is, you meditated if you sat still and let your thoughts run.

4) Repeat often. At some point your mind will probably run out of thoughts for a bit. To me it feels like a warm dark tingle and I realize all the sudden that I wasn’t thinking about anything. There is no way to know how long you weren’t thinking. Congratulate yourself and then let all the thoughts about how you finally got empty mind go–don’t exactly indulge them, but don’t police them either. You might not get there again for a while because you are pursuing it to hard, but after a time it becomes natural.

After:

1) If you fell asleep don’t get upset, it probably means you got to empty mind and your body checked out because of exhaustion. Congratulate yourself, get more sleep, and try again another day at another time of day when you are less tired.

2) If you have visions and spirits contacting you, take note of them and if you want to plan to focus on them later. But return to just letting things happen don’t particularly indulge them unless you feel it must be handled then. Take notes afterwards of anything that came up that you need to address.

3) Once you have achieved empty mind a few times, take note of how it feels and experiment with just remembering the feeling and see if it comes to you faster.

4) Take note of how meditating helps your stress levels and try to include it in your daily habits because it is very beneficial. Just doing it, not whether you achieve empty mind or not, is what makes it successful.