Establishing Your Meditation Posture

By: Bhikkhu Analayo

The sitting posture needs to be such that the spine is kept straight.  Here some degree of continuity of attention to the posture is required to avoid and slumping of the body….Keeping the body erect could be achieved by slowly passing our attention through the spine from bottom to top, relaxing each vertebra.  Such relaxing enables a natural alignment of the spine, by just letting gravity pull downwards.  The overall sense is as if the body were suspended from above, at the top of the head, and the rest of it relaxes downwards.  The resulting erectness of the body is not something to be held in a fixed manner.  Instead, the body remains flexible, comparable to a slender tree in the wind.  Such flexibility allows for minor adjustments to occur whenever we notice that the body is not fully in balance.  Needless to say, this does not mean that we keep shifting around all the time, but just that we avoid holding the posture rigidly and with tension, be it when sitting on the ground, a cushion, a bench, or a chair.

 In order to keep the body erect, we of course need to be aware of it.  Thus…[we] establish awareness of the body as a whole in the sitting posture and to some degree also monitor it throughout the meditation session, at least until such a deep level of concentration is reached that the posture of the body naturally remains firm.

From Mindfulness of Breathing. Bhikkhu Analayo is perhaps the foremost contemporary scholar-monk in the Theravadin tradition. Among the many books that he has published, his works on the four foundations of mindfulness—Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization and Satipatthana Meditation: A Practice Guide—are exceptional.

A Fully Permitted Exhalation and an Open House For Your Breathing

By: Charlotte Selver

…Being as busy as we are, with one activity heaped on top of another, our heads have lost their elasticity and freedom. Often this lack of freedom is created through the holding of too much inhalation inside of us, which doesn’t permit the cleaning out, the sweeping out, the renewing that is needed. Only fully permitted exhalation can do this. It would be helpful to give yourself plenty of time to find out whether you allow exahling as needed; that means whatever time exhaling wants to take when you do not do it, but allow it until you have, so to speak, a feeling of satisfaction, of completion.

It is also possible that, having permitted a satisfactory exhalation, nothing further seems to occur immediately in breathing. Don’t be upset by this. At one point breathing will start again. There is no need to worry if inhalation does not come immediately after the exhalation; and please listen to me as I say once more, if it comes, not if you inhale. Who can feel the difference? You know, some people take a breath. Wait until it comes by itself! And allow it to distribute in you as it wants to. In other words, be an open house for your breathing, and don’t manipulate it.

All this is a question of sensitivity, and when you orient yourself, you become a fine disoverer. It is much better when you find out about things for yourself, when you trust your own sensations and learn from them and do not have to be told everything. That is truly “exploring.” And you will be delighted at how clear a language the organism speaks.

Allowing Breathing

By: Charlotte Selver

…breathing comes by itself, spontaneously—if we allow it. Therefore, it is the allowing—the possibility of becoming more permissive—that we want to explore.

When we become more sensitive for what being permissive means, then the whole day is full of opportunities for exercising this possibility of becoming more permissive—or, if I might say it differently, more loving in the way we contact whatever we may contact. As soon as we become more open for something we do, we find that the first thing in which we can recognize this increased openness is our breathing.

…Exploring breathing really needs to be a practice, but a practice which is absolutely new each time—not a repetition of old ways, but a finding out what is going on in the condition and activity in which you happen to be at a particular moment. No moment can be compared with another; in wach there is something new to discover.

Breathing Is Always as the Person Is

By: Charlotte Selver

…Breathing is always as the person is. It is the clearest index of what is happening in the person—unless it is made up. Many people think they should breathe “properly.” Forget it! It is no use, because there is no “proper” breathing. Your breathing indicates very clearly what state you are in. When you are more reactive, your breathing is more reactive; when you are more habitual, your breathing is more habitual; if you are pushy, your breathing gets pushy too, or stops.

Breathing Connects Us With the World

By: Charlotte Selver

We by nature are not isolated from the world around us…and the process of breathing is connected with everything which happens in us and around us, just as plants are connected to everything around them.

All the mysterious interwovenness which is happening in the living organism is coming to expression in every moment in which we are living in our environment.

We are usually not awake enough for it, but sometimes you may have noticed that when something or somebody really interests you, you’re speeded up, even when you were tired a moment ago. Your breathing changes; you are functioning quite differently than before.

From Reclaiming Vitality and Presence: Sensory Awareness as a Practice for Life. Charlotte Selver (1901-2003) was a teacher of the Gindler/Jacoby method of awareness and exercise, a somatic bodywork method she further developed and taught after her arrival in the United States from Germany in 1938 as Sensory Awareness. Her work was highly influential to Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, and Fritz Perls (one of the founders of Gestalt Therapy). Selver frequently taught at the San Francisco Zen Center and its affiliated centers, and Suzuki Roshi was well acquainted with her. Her Sensory Awareness method has a close affinity with Soto Zen.

Face to Face with the Object of Meditation

By: Sayadaw U Pandita

It is as if you are walking along a road and you meet a traveler, face to face, coming from the opposite direction. When you are meditating, the mind should meet the object in just this way.  Only through direct confrontation with an object can true mindfulness arise.

They say that the human face is the index of character.  If you want to size up a person, you look at his or her face very carefully and then you can make a preliminary judgment.  If you do not examine the face carefully and instead become distracted by other parts of his or her body, then your judgment will not be accurate.  

In meditation you must apply a similar, if not sharper, degree of care in looking at the object of observation.  Only if you look meticulously at the object can you understand its true nature.  When. you look at a face for the first time, you get a quick, overall view of it.  If you look more carefully, you will pick up details--say, of the eyebrows, eyes, and lops.  First you must look at the face as a whole, and only later will details become clear.

Similarly, when you are watching the rising and falling of your abdomen, you begin by taking an overall view of these processes.  First you bring your mind face to face with the rising and falling.  After repeated successes you will find yourself able to look closer.  Details will appear to you effortlessly, as if by themselves.  You will notice different sensations in the rise and fall, such as tension, pressure, heat, coolness, or movement.

From In This Very Life: The Liberation Teachings of the Buddha. Sayadaw U Pandita (1921-2016) was a towering figure in the Insight meditation tradition of Burma. He was a successor to Mahasai Sayadaw and taught many prominent American meditation teachers,

Tuning the Breath in Zazen

By: Keizan Jokin

When sitting in meditation, your body may seem hot or cold, uneasy or uncomfortable, sometimes stiff, sometimes loose, sometimes heavy, sometimes light, sometimes startled awake.  This is all because the breath is not in tune and needs to be tuned.  The way of tuning the breath is as follows: open your mouth, letting the breath be long or short, gradually harmonizing it; following it for a while, when a sense of awareness comes, the breath is then in good tune.  After that let the breath pass naturally through the nose.

Keizan Jokin (1268-1325) is considered the “second founder” of Soto Zen. Keizan and his disciples are credited with spreading Soto Zen in Japan, away from monastic practice and toward a popular religion appealing to all levels of Japanese society.

What We Call "I" is Just a Swinging Door

By: Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

When we practice zazen our mind always follows our breathing.  When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world.  When we exhale, the air goes out to the outer world.  The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is limitless.  We say the “inner world” or “outer world,” but actually there is just one whole world.  In this limitless world, our throat is like a swinging door.  The air comes in and goes out like someone passing through a swinging door.  If you think “I breathe,” the “I” is extra.  There is no you to say “I”.  What we call “I” is just a swinging door when we inhale and when we exhale.  It just moves; that is all.  When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing: no “I”, no world, no mind, nor body, just a swinging door.

From Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Dogen on Samadhi

By: Eihei Dogen

The Buddha says: 'When you monks unify your minds, the mind is in samadhi. Since the mind is in samadhi, you know the characteristics of the creation and destruction of the various phenomena in the world [...] When you gain samadhi, the mind is not scattered, just as those who protect themselves from floods guard the levee.

From The Eight Awarenesses of the Enlightened Person, in The Hazy Moon of Enlightenment, by Taizan Maezumi and Bernie Glassman. Dogen (1200-1253) was the founder of the Soto Zen school in Japan.

Ways to Consider Samadhi

By: Rob Burbea

…samadhi is usually translated as ‘concentration’, but in many respects that does not convey the fullness, or the beauty, of what it really means.  Therefore we shall keep it in the original language...  For samadhi involves more than just holding the attention fixed on an object with a minimum of wavering.  And it certainly does not necessarily imply a spatially narrowed focus of the mind on a small area.  Instead here we will emphasize that what characterizes states of samadhi is some degree of collectedness and unification of mind and body in a sense of well-being.  Included in any such state will also be some degree of harmonization of the internal energies of the mind and the body.  Steadiness of mind, then, is only one part of that. 

 …although, as the Buddha did, we can certainly delineate a range of discrete states of samadhi (the jhanas), in this present context let us rather view it mostly as a continuum: of depth of meditation, of well-being, of non-entanglement, and of the refinement of consciousness.  [The advantage of this perspective is that there is less chance that] the relationship with practice becomes fraught with wondering too much if one “has it” or “doesn’t have it”, is “succeeding” or “failing”, is “in” or “out”.  Instead of relating to samadhi practice in terms of measurement or achievement of some goal, it is usually much more helpful, more kind, and less self-alienating to conceive of it as a caring, both in the present and in the long term, for the heart and mind.

From Seeing That Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising. Rob Burbea (1965-2020) was the Resident Teacher at Gaia House in England. He was an exceptionally gifted and innovative Dharma teacher, drawing on the Insight tradition, Tibetan emptiness practice, depth and archetypal psychology and the imaginal. A wealth of his teachings in both text and audio can be found at hermesamara.org

How Samadhi Can Arise With Zazen Practice

By John Daido Loori

Whether we work on the breath, with a koan, or shikantaza, zazen eventually leads to samadhi.  The first indication is usually an off-sensation of the body.  This happens most frequently during sesshin because of the long periods of sitting.  When you sit for a while without moving the body, it stops receiving information about its edges through the senses, such as the friction of your clothing, or an itch on your leg.  So, although you know the body is there, you don’t feel it.  Some people get frightened at this point and involuntarily their body twitches and defines its edges.  Then they slowly move to that place again, and gradually they learn to trust it and they begin to go a little further each time.  Next comes the off-sensation of the mind.  The mind is dependent on thoughts, but when the thoughts disappear, the mind disappears, the self disappears.  That constant reflex action that says, “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here” is the ego manifesting itself.  This is when we realize that we are constantly re-creating ourselves.

From The Art of Just Sitting. John Daido Loori (1931-2009) was the Abbott of Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York. He received Dharma Transmission from Taizan Maezumi Roshi. He also received Dharma Transmission in the Harada-Yasutani and Inzan lineages of Rinzai Zen as well.

Attributes of the Mind With Samadhi

By: Bhikkhu P.A. Payutto

The mind with samadhi contains the following main attributes:

1.        Strong and vigorous.  It is compared to a stream of water channeled into one direction, which has greater power than water that has been allowed to flow about without direction.

2.        Calm and serene, still and deep.  It is like a pool or lake of still water, the surface untouched by wind and unbroken by waves. 

3.        Clear, lucid, transparent.  It is like still water, without ripples, in which any dust has settled to the bottom.

4. Pliant and malleable, or fit for work, because it is not tense, not willful, not confused, not dull, not agitated.

From: The Essential Buddhadhamma:The Teachings and Practice of Theravada Buddhism. Bhikkhu Payutto is widely acknowledged as one of Thailand’s foremost Buddhist scholars. His Essential Buddhahamma is considered to be one of the most significant scholarly works on the Buddhism of the Pali Canon published in the last century. It was first published in Thailand in 1971 and was recently translated into English.

Melville's Equanimity Teaching

By: Herman Melville

Oh grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul…Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm.

From Moby Dick

The Sublime Joy Realized Through Dharma Practice

By Nyanaponika Thera

Life, though full of woe, holds also sources of happiness and joy, unknown to most. Let us teach people to seek and to find real joy within themselves and to rejoice with the joy of others! Let us teach them to unfold their joy to ever sublimer heights! Noble and sublime joy is not foreign to the Teaching of the Enlightened One. Wrongly, the Buddha’s Teaching is sometimes considered to be a doctrine diffusing melancholy. Far from it: the Dhamma leads step by step to an ever purer and loftier happiness.

Nyanaponika Thera (1901-1994), born Siegmund Feniger, was a German born Theravada monk and scholar who lived in Sri Lanka. He was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Nyanaponika Thera was a co-founder of the Buddhist Publication Society and the author of, among other things, The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, an excellent guide to mindfulness meditation and his most famous work. Upon his death, he was given a state funeral in Sri Lanka.

The Buddha on Equanimity

As a solid mass of rock is not stirred by the wind, so a sage is not stirred by the wind.

As a deep lake is clear and undisturbed, so a sage becomes clear upon hearing the Dharma.

Virtuous people always let go, they don’t prattle about pleasures and desires.

Touched by happiness and then by suffering, the sage shows no sign of being elated or depressed.

From the Dhammapada.

Mettā Toward Self is Not Getting Rid of Anything

Pema Chödrön

…[L]ovingkindness—maitrī (Pali, mettā)—toward ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. Maitrī means that we can still be crazy, we can still be angry. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That’s what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.

Curiosity involves being gentle, precise, and open—actually being able to let go and open. Gentleness is a sense of good-heartedness toward ourselves. Precision is being able to see clearly, not being afraid to see what’s really there. Openness is being able to let go and to open. When you come to have this kind of honesty, gentleness, and good-heartedness, combined with clarity about yourself, there’s no obstacle to feeling lovingkindness for others as well.

From “No(thing) to Improve”, Tricycle Magazine, March 20, 2021

Love Yourself and You Won't Hurt Others

By: Ānāgarika Munindra

If I do not love myself, I cannot love others also. If we really love ourselves, we cannot think wrongly, cannot talk wrongly, cannot act wrongly. If you know how to love yourself, you do not bring hatred anywhere. Mind is the forerunner of all good and evil. When mind becomes purified, it creates good karma. When mind is nonpolluted, then your action will be pure, the world will be pure. When you talk, it will be wise, nice, friendly. If you do not understand your anger and mind is influenced by anger, it becomes poisonous, and you suffer physically. When you act, it will create tension. It is the same for everybody.

From Living This Life Fully: Stories and Teachings of Munindra, by Mirka Knaster.

Munindra (1915-2003) was an Indian Vipassana teacher in the lineage of Mahasi Sayadaw. He was a teacher to Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg, among many others.

The Eleven Advantages of Mettā, According to the Buddha

The Buddha addressed the monks gathered at Jetavana at Anathapindika’s Monastery, in Savatthi as follows, regarding the advantages of mettā:

"Monks, eleven advantages are to be expected from the release (deliverance) of heart by familiarizing oneself with thoughts of loving-kindness (metta), by the cultivation of loving-kindness, by constantly increasing these thoughts, by regarding loving-kindness as a vehicle (of expression), and also as something to be treasured, by living in conformity with these thoughts, by putting these ideas into practice, and by establishing them. What are the eleven?

1. "He/she sleeps in comfort. 2. He/she awakes in comfort. 3. He/she sees no evil dreams. 4. He/she is dear to human beings. 5. He/she is dear to non-human beings. 6. Devas (gods) protect him/her. 7. Fire, poison, and sword cannot touch him/her. 8. His/her mind can concentrate quickly. 9. His/her countenance is serene. 10. He/she dies without being confused in mind. 11. If he/she fails to attain arahantship (the highest sanctity) here and now, he/she will be reborn in the brahma-world.”

From the Discourse on Advantages of Mettā, Anguttara Nikaya, 11.16, translated by Piyadassi Thera, and modified for gender inclusivity.