Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Mindfulness Hack
IdleChater
USA Veteran
in Mindfulness
With Shamatha meditation, the instruction is to rest your gaze on a spot - on the floor, about 3' out from where you sit.
Something I learned over the years was that this instruction is important. It's important because it teaches the student about a tool they can use in their practice. Kind of a hack.
When meditating, rest your gaze on your object (that spot on the floor). When you sense your eyes wandering away from the object, you are no longer meditating. Return to the object and resume meditation. Don't go all vise-grip on the object to prevent wandering. Just rest.
5
Comments
This is a great subject.
In paying attention to the micro moments of ones gaze becoming inattentive, you might notice that the eye's focus actually begins first to cross just enough to start creating a blank visual screen that the mind can then freely dominate. This a common observation amongst zazen forms that are practiced with the eyes open and is just indicative of the way we have habituated the process of sense gate data subservience in the promotion of our mind's own storylines.
Meditators who are blind or meditators who practice with their eyes closed can find the same precursors to a falling away from being fully present in the obfuscations of any of the other sense gates as well.
In Zen its good to note that such observations are considered to be more akin to concentration exercises than they are to the meditation itself. They can be foundational to the development of a meditation practice but shouldn't be mistaken for the meditation practice itself.
In a different tradition that has similarities to Zen they have a delightful admonishment to their meditators about it in saying one should be wary of becoming as limited as a cat watching a mouse hole.
My meditation practice drifts from "sort of" samadhi, to thoughts, to thoughts-bodily discomfort: "my left shoulder is tense, release it, my back is not straight, my back hurts; my knees don't hurt, but might hurt now?" This makes me move a lot during meditation and, even if they are subtle movements, I'm still "trying" to realise the correct posture while sitting zazen. It seems as if I'm working out at the gym and ensuring the best technique to ensure my bench pressing will reap the right results.
Help!
Few things point out the fallacy of a correct posture like achieving such a thing, because the difficulties of a meditation practice will simply continue on unabated despite such a narrow achievement.
Do you think that a mind, when threatened with a potential curtailment of its empire during meditation, won't bring up the ideal of a perfect posture to neutralize such a threat?
How much of these aches and pains are about having chosen a meditation posture that is more ideal-based than it is actually comfortable?
Is each moment of your life, also equally filled with these aches & pains when you are simply being physically still?
Interesting! It's my feeling that posture is overrated. I think it's important for novice meditators, but one of those rafts that can be discarded. I've taken 3 levels of Shambhala training and the staff is always going around the room "correcting" posture. I found it extremely distracting to be suddenly told to place my hands on my thighs, palm down, just behind the knees. My hands were just fine in my lap and I had been meditating comfortably. Thank god I never did a Dathun.
After a couple of years, I found sitting on the floor wasn't going to work. My legs were going numb and it hurt. Rather than fight it, I started sitting on a stool or chair. 15" above the floor is about right. Much better. I still didn't conform to "correct posture" for a chair, which was fine by me. Not so fine with some meditation instructors, but whatever. Usually they'll try to correct me a couple of times, but when I continue in normal practice, they leave me alone.
There is the ideal and then there's the real world, so to speak.
While I have been graced with a body that happens to sit easily in the Seiza posture, various knee, hip, and ankle injuries in life have occasionally required my formal meditation to be spent in chairs. I saw little difference in my meditation between sitting on the floor and sitting in a chair.
There can, however, be some noticeable differences between the two hand mudras that you mentioned. The hand mudra of the palms laying down on the thighs is generally reserved for supervised sittings as it is usually used for a resting of the mind, a grounding of the body, or the cultivation of a focus on the root chakra which can provide emotional strength in the face of arising fear and anxiety.
The mudra you chose of putting the hands facing upward in your lap is more common, requires little supervision, and simply puts more emphasis on the harmonization between the body & mind.
Bare in mind though, that I come from a lineage that places much emphasis on the study of the minutia that can affect formal meditation, compared to many other schools that are more casual about meditation instructions.
Meditation is not for poseurs.
It is being comfortable with where the mind positions itself without being distracted by its shenanigans.
When the Shambhala shambles into Zen or asana or beard stroking etc, how you react to the stick flagellation or Trungpa fondle is still mindfulness practice.
I was very happy to attend free classes and retreats with Shambhala, extreme yogis, cult Sufis and the usual weirdos. At the moment my main mindfulness is after formality, as ever.
Doing our best everyone ✅🫂😌
One thing that occurs to me is that in some ways meditation posture is like an asana, a position which evokes a certain state of mind. So it’s not that the posture is pointless, it has a use, it is an aid to the mental process of meditation.
But for me it has always been about finding a position that is relaxed and comfortable. My knees and ankles don’t do the full lotus, and so on.