Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Meditation

How Not to Cheat Yourself with Meditation

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On January 8, 2019

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Some time back I wrote a short guide to concentration meditation. Reception was positive and some people wanted me to write more.

So, let’s talk about one way to divide meditative accomplishments:

  1. Takes Effort.
  2. Doesn’t take effort.

When I was 18, I could run ten five-minute miles in a row. It was great. When I stopped training a lot, that ability went away.

The second type is a change from one state to another. When you’ve got the new state, it doesn’t take much effort, if any, to sustain. When you learn to ride a bike, it sucks. But if you don’t ride a bike for 20 years (as I didn’t) then get back on one, you don’t have to go through days or weeks or months of training again.

A lot of valuable meditative accomplishments are like being very fit. Being able to go into the various Buddhist concentration Samadhis is a learned skill. To maintain it, you need to meditate about two hours a day, and if you don’t you’ll lose access to them. These Samadhis are very worthwhile, lovely to be in, and can make your other meditative exercises much more powerful.

But they go away if you don’t maintain them.

The Buddha famously learned the concentration meditations to the highest level and decided they didn’t solve the problem of suffering. The issue with all of these sorts of accomplishments is that they end, and they’re likely to fail you when you need them the most. When you’re too ill to meditate multiple hours a day is exactly when you will need, say, the bliss that Samadhis provide, and it won’t be there.

I already knew this, but I had it illustrated in my recent surgery. The shock of the (very major) surgery lost me all of my meditative abilities from the first category. It was about a week before I got the first bit back, and a month before I got the rest back. So there I am, in a lot of pain and so on, and most of the tools that would help me make it better are gone.

Anything which requires force or conscious action is temporary. It can or will be lost.

This is why most schools don’t consider these sorts of abilities to mean someone is enlightened or awakened. If you can go into Samadhi for days on end, that’s great, but it’s just a skill.

The second set of accomplishments are more or less permanent. You can lose some of them, with extreme brain damage or if you deliberately go out of your way to do so, but basically, once you have them, they’re sticky and they don’t require maintenance beyond not self-sabotaging.

This includes the Buddhist 4-part model, starting with Stream Entry, when that doesn’t refer to energy bodies (which in some schools, it does). It includes things like “I am everything” where everything feels like part of you. It includes “not an actor” and “no self” or “witness self.” It includes substantial changes to personality, where previous binding conditioning stops controlling you. (Truly ending an addiction would qualify, IF you aren’t running around still saying “I’ll always be an alcoholic.” It must truly be gone.)

Complicating this is the fact that a lot of the shifts I listed in the second category can be learned as abilities in the first category. You can learn to shift your perception into no-self, or “I am everything.”

If doing so requires sustained effort (if it isn’t an easy mode shift requiring no effort to maintain once you do it), it belongs to category one. You can lose it and when you need it most, it probably won’t be there.

For the more esoteric stuff, like energy bodies, this gets complicated. (But most readers won’t believe this stuff exists.) For example, the great Chan Buddhist criticism of Theravada Buddhism is that the energy body Arhats can obtain isn’t permanent. It lasts eons, but it slowly loses energy and in fact, contra what the Theravada guys say, you have to eventually reincarnate. (Is this criticism valid? No idea.) So the Chan guys want one energy body up, which they say is permanent. You don’t have to come back, ever, if you don’t want to.

The stuff that sticks can come from a number of things. Classically it comes from cessation experiences, where the data going to consciousness hits zero, you blank out, and when you return, the way you interact with the world changes semi-permanently.

How it changes depends on what you were doing that led up to the cessation. If you want particular changes, you have to do particular exercises.

Basically exercises like this are meant to narrow the brain’s attention to one particular part of experience: Say that there is only a witness that is never changed (Buddhist “no self”), keep hitting it with that over and over again, and then, in cessation, lock it in.

Multiple cessations are often required to really lock it in.

But there are other types of awakenings. I once had a completely mundane awakening, no spirituality involved at all.

I drank too much one night. Way too much. The next day I was nauseous all day. (I hate nausea far more than most pain.) Didn’t stop until the evening.

I’ve never over-drank like that since (been slightly hungover, but never seriously. I drink maybe three times a year.) The desire to do so just isn’t there. For an entire day, my brain was pounded with “This is NOT worth it.” Perfectly mundane, classical awakening structure. (For the record, I wasn’t an alcoholic before that.)

The key is that there is no effort. I don’t have to use willpower. I’m not gritting my teeth thinking, “I shouldn’t drink.” I just don’t want to drink most of the time, and on the rare occasion when I do there is no difficulty in stopping when I have had enough. (Now, Coca-cola is binding conditioning for me. I have to use effort sometimes to stay off that soda.)

What “enlightenment” is, is a long debate. I could spiel off a dozen definitions. But what I do agree with the Buddha on is that if your enlightenment requires you to maintain effort, it isn’t enlightenment.

That doesn’t mean effortful abilities aren’t worth having. I’ve been in fantastic physical shape at various points in my life, and it’s sure nicer than being in bad shape. I had moderately high concentration accomplishments at one point, and they were very nice to have.

They are also useful in pursuing the non-effortful accomplishments.

But don’t confuse the two, or you will cheat yourself.

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Breaking Your Chains

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On September 17, 2018

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I started blogging in 2003. Since then, I’ve written well over a million words. There was a time when I wrote two or three articles a day.

I thought that the writing mattered, that it made a difference. It did to some people, but not to many. Seven billion people have a lot of momentum, and stopping them or even turning them is close to impossible, especially when the lever you have is just blogging.

Oh well.

Various bad stuff has happened. More bad stuff will happen. As I’ve written before, this stuff is now baked in. It will happen, it cannot be stopped. When you’re going 200 miles an hour and ten feet from the wall, everything is over except the casualty report.

You should probably still slam on the brakes, though.

A few years ago, I turned my primary emphasis from, oh, let’s call it political economics to more fundamental issues.

Why do people believe in what they do? Why do they do what they do? And how can that be changed?

Because, as I’ve written before, the primary problem isn’t that we don’t know what our problems are, or even how to fix them (in technical terms). It is that we aren’t fixing them even though we know they exist and have a pretty good idea how to fix them.

I mean, to repeat myself yet again, we’ve known about climate change, undeniably, since the late 70s at the latest. And we did, well, basically nothing. We know that inequality is terrible for everyone, and people were warning back in the late 80s about it and we, well, slammed our foot down on the accelerator.

And so on.

Now, this isn’t a new pursuit for me. I wondered about it when I was a teenager, but I examined it, mostly, the wrong way–through anthropology, sociology, linguistics, history, neuroscience, and so on.

Oh, it’s not that these disciplines don’t have important insights, but they are all fragmentary and none of them tell you the most important thing, not really: How to change.

I mean, it’s nice to have some insights into why you’re fucked up, but if those insights don’t lead to the ability to become less fucked up, the exercise is somewhat sterile.

There are a group of people who have, over millennia, spent virtually all their time examining  how the human mind works, and why it believes what it believes. Spiritual people.

Not religious people, understand; religion is what people who want pat answers to the insights of spiritual people. They suck the insights dry, and turn them into set rules.

You’ve got someone like Mohammed, say, whose first followers are mostly slaves, women, and poor people. And Mohammed, well, he made their lives better; he made new rules which were not as bad as the old rules. Sure, women still weren’t equal to men, but they had more rights than before.

And poltroons and fools think that the new rules are now set in stone for eternity, rather than considering that he was making things as much better as he could under the circumstances and given his own, unbroken conditioning.

Then there’s poor Jesus. Good God, what his followers have done to his teachings! They’ve turned them into, with some exceptions like the social gospel (now dead), an utter force for evil.

This is the fate of the great spiritual figures–to be misunderstood. Sometimes that misunderstanding doesn’t do too much harm (Buddha, yes, some); sometimes it does a lot, as with Mohammed and Christ.

Or, as Marx, a great ideologue, though not a great spiritual figure, said: “I am not a Marxist.”

Or Jesus: “I am not a Christian.”

Anyway, there’s a type of spirituality which basically involves learning to examine one’s mind, until the way it really works becomes something one can’t deny any more.

Jiddu Krishnamurti tried to teach this. Failed miserably. Maybe got one person enlightened, despite spending his entire life working at it.

The problem he had was that he really wouldn’t give instructions. He was scared of the founder effect; he wanted people to learn to think for themselves and not reify a bunch of new rules.

So, yeah, that didn’t work too well.

The simplest rule of the mind is that everything in it is stuff given to you by other people. Your religion, your nationality, your love of sports, whatever… it’s all conditioning and while it isn’t precisely all garbage, it’s close to it. You didn’t choose it, but you think it is “you.” You think your personality is you, or that you are American or Chinese or Hindu or Christian or Jewish.

You’re full up to the brim with stinking garbage; realities created by “wise” men of the past, which served their purposes and which has been, usually, completely unsuited to living a healthy, happy life with other humans in such a way that you don’t, well, destroy the ecosphere, for one.

And the humor of it is in the identification with it–that you, that we, think that all this garbage is actually us. It’s closer to a sickness, a virus, passed from sufferer to sufferer.

And it’s why we’re ten yards from a wall, going 100 miles an hour.

If you want to stop being sick, and a vector for sickness, start by just resting and examining the contents of your consciousness as they come and go.

And be ready to be really unhappy, as you realize you’re a slave.

But it is the slave who believes they are free who is most chained: You can’t break invisible chains.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Loving-Kindness Isn’t About Morality

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On May 20, 2018

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It is said that once upon a time, Siddhartha Gautama, before he was the Buddha, was sitting on the ground and was overwhelmed by a great feeling of sweetness towards all that lived, from the bug he saw on the ground, to the grass, and trees, to all the people, and including himself, without any distinction. He remembered that he had felt this way before, as a young child, and he realized in this feeling part of the solution he had sought to the problem of ending suffering.

One of the great problems with the mandate to love that is one of the keys to most, perhaps all, great faiths, is that it is taken as a moral commandment.

Thou must love, or you’re a bad person.

By the time Siddhartha had this insight, in the stories (who knows what happened in reality), he’d been seeking for a long time. He had studied under many masters, was an expert meditator, and so on.

He was seeking an end to suffering, that is all. His goal wasn’t to be a good person.

But here’s the thing, when you truly love, and I’m not talking about the lust that often passes for love, especially in the early throes of infatuation, but that tender warm sweetness, you can’t feel fear.

Cannot.

Likewise, anger, hate, and so on are disabled while you are in this state.

Being loving protects you from a lot of suffering. It doesn’t stop pain, but it reduces the suffering of pain.

If you love, all and everything, and combine this with deep equanimity, you fall deep into parasympathetic mode. You are relaxed, you do not tense against pain and loss, and so the effect of them is reduced.

The effect of love becomes confused when the insights of mystics become the dogmas of religion.

Love is, as best I can tell (and many great mystics disagree with me), not the highest form of consciousness. But it is an easy path towards the highest, as it allows easy concentration and complete relaxation, with all the attendant benefits.

There are other ways to do this, but oddly, if you relax enough, love tends to arise. It is a strange sort of dispassionate love; felt for everyone and often everything, with little compulsion to action.

And it is an unconditional love. When mystics look at what secular people call love, they find it a sickness. We love people because they make us feel good, and when they stop making us feel good we usually stop loving them. This isn’t love, to a mystic, it is a transaction.

The practice of loving kindness is simple enough. Find someone or something you can love unreservedly (the Christian God is usually bad for this, since most people are terrified of him and hate him, though they will not admit it. After all, if you displease him, he will have you tortured for eternity.)

Feel love to that person (a puppy or a young child, or a God who isn’t a torturer are good candidates). Imagining open you arms wide for a big hug (or even starting by actually opening them) can be a good start.

Then once you can feel this love on demand, move it to people you love, but about whom you have mixed feelings, and slowly work your way to loving people you hate or fear or despise.

The trap to be careful of here is not falling into misery. If you spend too much time on how these people are suffering, instead of feeling love, you can wind up sad, and that’s not the point.

Deep lovingness allows the body and mind to rest and relax. It allows muscles held in contraction, often for decades, to let go. It allows concentration, because fear and worry and other compulsive thoughts are reduced.

It is NOT the entire path (though there are many who think it is), because it can get you very very far, to the point where you’re both genuinely a sage and a really wonderful person (and other people can feel it when they’re around someone who has developed like this).

But it feels really great and gets you a long way, and of the techniques with which the Buddha is associated, it ranks next to concentration on the breath as one of the two main spears of practice. (There are other pieces to the practice, like insight meditation; more on that in a later piece.)

And remember, the most important person to love, and often the hardest, is yourself. Don’t start there, as a rule (few people have uncomplicated feelings towards themselves), but somewhere along the path, spend a lot of time loving yourself.

There’s a ton of cultural baggage and conditioning in the West that says one shouldn’t do that–that it’s selfish, that we’re bad people who don’t deserve love, and so on.

Forget it. Even if you’re a terrible person who has done terrible things, to walk this path and reduce suffering, you’ve got to love yourself. It’s not about “deserving”; full loving kindness includes loving terrible people, it’s a technique to accomplish something.

Nor need you fear that you’ll be unable to take care of yourself if you’re loving. You don’t have to become a pushover just because you love people. Kill them with love if necessary. You’ll just be far less likely to hurt others as a default action.

When loving kindness becomes crippling is when it is taken as a moral prescription, rather than as a skillful means. You aren’t loving because others deserve it (they neither do nor don’t), you are loving because it is a far better way to live than being angry, hateful, and scared.

More on anger and hate later.

And, uh, before you love your neighbour as yourself, learn to love yourself. The way some people treat themselves, I’d rather they hated me.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

The Subtle Art of Letting Go of Suffering

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On March 29, 2018

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Odin with the ravens Thought and Memory

As regular readers know, I’ve been meditating fairly seriously for years. (Primer on concentration meditation.)

About a week ago, I found I was able to dismiss a minor pain. It was a long term pain, due to a slightly rotated hip. I expanded my awareness, then put my attention on the pain, and thought “I don’t need to feel this” in a dispassionate way. The pain went away.

(Recently I had a more serious pain, and was unable to dismiss it, so, yeah, the method’s not reliable yet.)

But I got to thinking about what makes suffering go away–whether it’s physical pain, emotional, or an ugly thought, or whatever.

There’s a lot of talk in self-help and spiritual circles about surrender and acceptance and all that, and it usually makes me nauseous. Bad situations are bad situations.

But the core problem with these words are the connotations: They suggest that you become a potato and just accept the status quo, whatever it is.

That isn’t necessary. What does seem to be necessary is letting your brain know, “This isn’t important.”

When you try to push something away emotionally, your brain interprets that as, “This is still important, I should keep bringing it up.”

So if you’re in physical pain, and it bothers you emotionally that you are, the brain keeps shoving the pain into consciousness.

If you’re sad, or angry, and in addition to the primary sadness or anger, you are also upset that you’re sad or angry. Thus, the brain interprets that as, “This is still important, I should keep harping on this till it’s resolved!”

This can get meta, fast, when you’re dealing with emotions. Don’t get angry that you’re angry, and so on.

When you just let whatever is coming up, come up, without adding anything to it (either pushing it away or pulling it towards you) the brain gets the message “This doesn’t matter,” and brings it up less often, and less intensely over time.

You can push this along by “diving in” to whatever it is. Moving your attention directly into the sensation, whether it’s pain, anger, sadness, or anything else. If, at the same time, you can keep your awareness “wide,” including as much of the rest of your body and world as possible, it also makes whatever it is seem small–just a small part of awareness, and not the whole of the world.

Then, just add a hint of intentionality: “This isn’t important/this doesn’t matter.”

And see what happens.

Doing this requires equanimity: an ability to not be upset that you’re upset, an ability to look at anything without getting into a spiral of resistance.

This is hard because we believe the world ought to be a certain way, and we get offended when it isn’t. But the world is as it is, and we need to see it as it is.

Again, this doesn’t mean being a potato: You can have preferences. But if you push hard emotionally, you’re telling your mind that the problem is not resolved. And it will keeping bringing it up until you don’t care (Which may be never).

This is best practiced like any type of exercise: Start small. If your mother whipped you with a wet noodle and you’ve a lifelong terror of noodles that keeps you out of the pasta aisle, then stay out of the pasta aisle and start with something else, something small.

Equanimity is a mental muscle, and it needs to be built up. Especially if you’ve never used it, trying to start with your greatest fear or the personality trait you hate most is just setting yourself up for failure, like expecting to be able to do pullups if you’ve never been to the gym, or run a five-minute mile if you’ve never run.

Look at what is, as it is, without pushing or pulling it. Have a reasoned preference for it to go away. Repeat over time. See what happens.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

What Different Types of Meditation Do

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On November 30, 2017

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Some time ago I posted a basic guide on concentration meditation.

There are a lot of different types of meditation, but the two you’re most likely to run into in the West are concentration meditation and insight meditation.

The two types aren’t unrelated. If you do insight meditation properly you will improve your concentration. If you do concentration meditation correctly, you will have insights, mostly to do with how little control you have over what you think of as “your mind.”

If you’re willing to commit enough time, you should do both, and and should also include open awareness meditation at some point.

There are two main goals of these types of meditation. Insight and “yoking.” Yoga, by which I don’t mean the sort of physical exercise which most westerners consider yoga, is first about yoking, second about insight.

Yoking is when all, or almost all parts of your mind (which includes all parts of your body that report in, your “consciousness”) are working together. A yoked mind is clear and stable and capable of doing whatever it wants without distraction.

(I don’t have a yoked mind, but it’s more stable and concentrated than it used to be.)

Yoking is primarily a result of concentration meditation, but it’s aided by having good insights.

Insight meditation is about understanding yourself, and getting your mind/brain/body to accept those insights at a fundamental level. A real insight is more than intellectual, it changes how you experience the world fundamentally. You will feel different after an actual insight (awakening). Often, though not always, this manifests as long held tensions in the body relaxing.

Recently, I had an awakening which released much of the muscles of my lower back, so that it isn’t curved inwards nearly as much. When that persisted over a few days (a.k.a. a few sleeps), I knew it was real.

The more “yoked” your mind is, even before something approaching full yoking, the more likely you are to have insights, because your attention becomes stable. If you are putting your attention on sensations from the body, say, you are more likely to understand those sensations if you can keep your attention on them longer. The same is true if you are examining your thoughts, emotions, internal narrative, or the products of any of your other senses.

The more insight meditation you do, the better your concentration will get, but not as fast as if you were emphasizing concentration.

When I was young, I was a serious runner. In grade 12, I ran about 40 miles a week. I could also do a hundred push ups easily, get up and not be winded, but I was not muscular and could not do many pull-ups or lift heavy weights. The exercise I did made me stronger than doing no exercise, but it wasn’t primarily about strength.

Meditation is, in part, exercise for the mind. Different exercises make the mind better at doing different things, there is overlap, but there is also a trade-off.

Insight meditation heads straight for the goal of much meditation: Rewiring your brain to perceive the world differently. Insights don’t just make you stronger, they make your brain operate differently. Ultimately the goal is to have a brain that operates in ways that a normal brain, without the insights, just can’t, much like an ordinary person can’t waltz without at least some training, or do complicated gymnastics, or walk a tightrope.

Take a third, common form of meditation: loving-kindness. In loving-kindness meditation, you spend your time feeling love. You start with easy to love people, your dog, hopefully your mother, maybe God (if you aren’t scared of God, which most Westerners are), maybe an idol (the Dalai Lama or Gandhi or Nelson Mandela). You move to people you don’t care about, then you move to people you fear or hate.

You do this every day, ideally for hours a day, and you get to the point where you can be feeling love for anyone, all the time, including people who are actively in your face trying to do you harm (nope, I don’t have this; fuck ’em).

This puts you in parasympathetic mode all the time (rest and digest), which is very healthy and good for you. At the top levels, you become one of those people who seem to radiate love all the time. It makes other forms of meditation really easy, because your brain is never scared (you can’t be scared and deeply loving at the same time), and therefore, it shuts up and stops trying to alert you of every possible threat.

The internal martial arts, like Tai-Chi or Bagua, or even Systema, are based on learning some of this: How to punch people with love, how to stay relaxed when a normal person would be freaking out and losing fine motor control (even normal martial artists).

Which is why most people never become good at fighting with internal martial arts: Because they are based on fighting people without much, or ideally any, fear- or anger-based adrenaline response.

So, loving kindness meditation, taken far enough, lets you do something that an untrained mind cannot do. Be loving even to your enemies while they are punching you, or perhaps even if you are punching them. “I don’t punch you because I love you, but I love you while I punch you.”

Many readers will be thinking: “This is bullshit. This is not possible. You are full of it.”

It’s something someone without a lot of training cannot do. Many people cannot even imagine doing it.

So, back to insight meditation. Insight meditation can rewire the brain in a number of ways. The first rewiring I received was “I am not my personality.” Why? Because when my personality changes, as it has through my life, I’m still me. This is easy to understand intellectually, it is hard to believe it in your body and brain.

Insight meditation can also get you to things like “I don’t do anything” which are profoundly alienated from common experience. (See the Bhagavad Gita for the purest expression of this.) I haven’t had this at the full awakening level, but I slip into it at times because I’ve done a lot of meditation around it: I know I don’t “control” my brain or my body or my thoughts. I’ve watched them very closely, I’ve tried to control them, etc.

Other available insights include “Everything passes,” “I am everything,” “I am nothing,” “I am the witness,” “I am not my body,” and some stuff that is even more alienated from common experience like “Suffering is just information I can disregard.”

These awakenings rewire the mind/brain/body. Sometimes only partially, sometimes what seems to be fully, and they are one of the main goals of many serious meditators because you carry these insights with you when you aren’t meditating.

As lovely as yoking is, and as much as the very best meditators can stay there for months, it can be upset. Basic rewiring of the mind/brain from Awakenings, on the other hand, is much more sticky.

And it gives the big rewards, like cessation of suffering, feeling of unity with the world, and so on.

(Some very good meditators are blissed out while meditating and miserable when not meditating. Nice to have, but…)

It should be emphasized that these forms of meditation can work together. The Buddha emphasized three: loving kindness, concentration on the breath, and insight meditation. If you’re loving all the time, it’s easier to concentrate. Easier concentration makes insight easier. Insight gets you the big goals, and hey, yoking is apparently amazing–your body feels good virtually all the time: bliss of body, bliss of mind.

More on all of this at a later date if interest remains high, including basic insight meditation and how to do open-awareness meditation.

(See Also, Some Fruits of Meditation: Simple Happiness.)

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

How to Meditate 101

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On October 8, 2017

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Odin with the ravens Thought and Memory

I get questions on this, so here it is. This is basic concentration meditation (Shamatha) but it will lead to insights.

Try to do it regularly. If you can do only five minutes, that’s fine, but push towards an hour to to two hours a day. Treat it like exercise, you’re training your mind, just like you’d train your body.

Step One: Choose an object of attention. Standard Buddhist is your breath. Standard Hindu is a mantra – words you speak or think (move towards thinking them) while paying attention to the sound of them. If you use a mantra it should be something emotionally neutral or unalloyed positive (don’t meditate on God, say, if you fear going to hell).

I suggest breath, but some mantras are:

  • “Roots” (an emotionally neutral word)
  • Om Mani Padme Hum
  • Om Nama Shivaya
  • Om Ah Bee Lah Hung Chit (Vairocana mantra)

If you use a mantra, you should do so with the breath. One syllable or word should be said or thought on the exhale or inhale.

If you use the breath, attention stays on the negative part of it–when you’re not breathing.

Step Two: Intend to notice when you are no longer paying attention to the object of attention.

Step Three: Put your attention lightly on the objection of attention.

Step Four: At some point, you will notice that you are not paying attention to the object. Pat yourself on the back for noticing that you aren’t paying attention the breath. Be pleased. Then:

  • Look at whatever you’re now paying attention to, appreciate it for a second or two without judgment, then think to yourself either “this isn’t important,” or “I’ll deal with this after meditating”.
  • Move your attention back to your object of attention.

REPEAT

Do this for either as long as you can stand to, or a predetermined time (set an alarm).

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Notes:

You should do this with your spine straight. You can sit on the ground, in a stiff backed chair, on lie on your side with  your knees drawn up. Sitting without support has the advantage that if you start to fall asleep, falling will make you wake up. That said, due to illness I did almost all my meditation lying flat on my back for years, which is not how you’re supposed to do it. It isn’t as important as doing it.

This style of meditation is training your meta-attention: Training you to notice when you have stopped paying attention to the object of attention. You can do it with any object of attention: homework, your little finger, staring at a fire, watching a boring presentation, work you’d rather not do, the feeling of the position of your body as you walk, etc.

So you can do it during your daily life if you wish. Just decide what you should be paying attention to, intend to notice when you stop, be pleased that you notice, decide that whatever grabbed your attention isn’t important or can wait, and go back to your original object of attention.

Eventually you will get to the point where you rarely lose attention on your chosen object, at that point you’re actually pretty accomplished, but there’s further to go. At that point (or if you’re interested), the best book I’ve read on this style of meditation is The Mind Illuminated, by Culdassa.

This sort of meditation will lead to important insights about your mind, as well, by the way: how it works, who you are, and so on. It’s not unalloyed “concentration,” it includes insight.

Enjoy. (If this is popular enough, I’ll do a second article on how to improve your ability to concentrate.)

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