How to Meditate

HOW

TO

MEDITATE

A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO MAKING
FRIENDS WITH YOUR MIND   

PEMA CHÖDRÖN

Meditation is simply training our state of being so that our mind and body can be synchronized. Through the practice of meditation, we can learn to be without deception, to be fully genuine and alive.

—
CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE

Our life is an endless journey: the practice of meditation allows us to experience all the textures of the roadway, which is what the journey is all about.

—CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE

ENHANCED CONTENTS

Track 1 (5:37)

Becoming Your Own Meditation Instructor

Track 2 (5:42)

Relating with Thoughts

Track 3 (3:25)

Relating with Emotions

Track 4 (8:22)

Relating with Sense Perceptions

Track 5 (3:51)

The Results of Meditation

CONTENTS

Enhanced Contents

Introduction: Choosing to Live Wholeheartedly

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

C
HOOSING TO
L
IVE
W
HOLEHEARTEDLY

The principle of nowness is very important to any effort to establish an enlightened society. You may wonder what the best approach is to helping society and how you can know that what you are doing is authentic and good. The only answer is nowness. The way to relax, or rest the mind in nowness, is through the practice of meditation. In meditation you take an unbiased approach. You let things be as they are, without judgment, and in that way you yourself learn to be.

—
CHÖGYAM TRUNGPA RINPOCHE

T
he mind is very wild. The human experience is full of unpredictability and paradox, joys and sorrows, successes and failures. We can’t escape any of these experiences in the vast terrain of our existence. It is part of what makes life grand—and it is also why our minds take us on such a crazy ride. If we can train ourselves through meditation to be more open and more accepting toward the wild arc of our experience, if we can lean into the difficulties of life and the ride of our minds, we can become more settled and relaxed amid whatever life brings us.

There are numerous ways to work with the mind. One of the most effective ways is through the tool of sitting meditation. Sitting meditation opens us to each and every moment of our life. Each moment is totally unique and unknown. Our mental world is seemingly predictable and graspable. We believe that thinking through all the events and to-dos of our life will provide us with ground and security. But it’s all a fantasy, and this very moment, free of conceptual overlay, is completely unique. It is absolutely unknown. We’ve never experienced this very moment before, and the next moment will not be the same as the one we are in now. Meditation teaches us how to relate to life directly, so that we can truly experience the present moment, free from conceptual overlay.

If we look at the dharma—in other words, the teachings of the Buddha, the truth of what is—we see that through the practice of meditation the intention is to remove suffering. Maybe that’s why so many people are attracted to meditation, because generally people don’t find themselves sitting in the meditation posture unless they have something that’s bothering them. But the Buddhist teachings are not only about removing the symptoms of suffering, they’re about actually removing the cause, or the root, of suffering. The Buddha said, “I teach only one thing: suffering and the cessation of suffering.”

In this book, I want to emphasize that the root of suffering is mind—our minds. And also, the root of happiness is our mind. The sage Shantideva, in the
Bodhicaryavatara,
in talking about the subject of suffering, offered a famous analogy for how we try to alleviate our suffering. He’s said that if you walk on the earth and it’s hurting your feet, you might want to cover all the earth with hides of leather, so that you’d never have to suffer from the pain of the ground. But where could such an amount of leather be found? Rather, you could simply wrap a bit of leather around your feet, and then it’s as if the whole world is covered with leather and you’re always protected.

In other words, you could endlessly try to have suffering cease by dealing with outer circumstances—and that’s usually what all of us do. It is the usual approach; you just try to solve the outer problem again and again and again. But the Buddha said something quite revolutionary, which most of us don’t really buy: if you work with your mind, you will alleviate all the suffering that seems to come from the outside. When something is bothering you—a person is bugging you, a situation is irritating you, or physical pain is troubling you—you must work with your mind, and that is done through meditation. Working with our minds is the only means through which we’ll actually begin to feel happy and contented with the world that we live in.

There’s an important distinction that needs to be made about the word “suffering.” When the Buddha said, “The only thing I teach is suffering and the cessation of suffering,” he used the word
dukkha
for suffering. Dukkha is different than pain. Pain is an inevitable part of human life, as is pleasure. Pain and pleasure alternate, and they’re just part and parcel of anybody who has a body and a mind and is born into this world.

The Buddha didn’t say that, “I teach only one thing: pain and the cessation of pain.” He said pain
is
—you have to grow up to the fact, mature to the fact, relax to the fact that there will be pain in your life. You’re not going to reach the point where, if someone you love dies, you won’t feel grief. You’re not going to reach the point where if you fall down a flight of stairs you’re not bruised. As you age, your back might hurt and your knees might ache. These things and many others could happen.

Even the most advanced meditator has moods. The quality of energy moving through people—the heavier, more oppressive energies that we call depression, or fear, or anxiety—these kinds of mood energies run through all beings, just as the weather changes from day to day. Our internal weather is shifting and changing all the time, whether we’re fully enlightened or not. The question then becomes, how do we work with these shifting energies? Do we need to completely identify with them and get carried away and dragged down by them?