Simply saying, "Oh, if I focus my attention on my breathing I'll feel more relaxed," is not enough. If meditation were about stress relief, we could forgo having to understand our own minds and simply get a good massage. Instead, it's crucial to consider the implications of guiding our mind away from the pursuit of every little thought that pops into our head.
This is what we do in meditation practice: gently guide ourselves toward observing thoughts and emotions from an ever-larger perspective. We use the natural tendency we refer to as meditation to return us again and again to a more open view of our experience, rather than our usual habit to return again and again to a smaller view.
When we meditate, we acknowledge that we're thinking but try not to follow the thoughts. Instead we bring our attention back to the sensation of the breath going in and out. We recognize we are caught in a thought or fantasy, and then we bring the attention back to the breath. That's what meditation is--returning our attention to the object.
Once we can squarely recognize the condition we're all in, it's natural to say, "Well, I don't want to drift at the whim of conditions coming together just right. I want to be able to feel content even when things don't go exactly my way." Stabilizing and strengthening the mind through a regular meditation practice can help accomplish this.
Excerpt from "Take the Big View" by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
This is what we do in meditation practice: gently guide ourselves toward observing thoughts and emotions from an ever-larger perspective. We use the natural tendency we refer to as meditation to return us again and again to a more open view of our experience, rather than our usual habit to return again and again to a smaller view.
When we meditate, we acknowledge that we're thinking but try not to follow the thoughts. Instead we bring our attention back to the sensation of the breath going in and out. We recognize we are caught in a thought or fantasy, and then we bring the attention back to the breath. That's what meditation is--returning our attention to the object.
Once we can squarely recognize the condition we're all in, it's natural to say, "Well, I don't want to drift at the whim of conditions coming together just right. I want to be able to feel content even when things don't go exactly my way." Stabilizing and strengthening the mind through a regular meditation practice can help accomplish this.
Excerpt from "Take the Big View" by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche