There's a saying in Zen that 'a painting of a rice cake cannot satisfy hunger'.

If you're anything like me, you might think of those puffed rice cake things whose only real value is as a flat surface for chocolate spread or peanut butter, but the saying comes from Tang dynasty China, so they probably had something else in mind. Modern-day Asian rice cakes actually look pretty appetising to me.

However, no matter how appealing the image above is, I find that I can't derive any actual nourishment from staring at the pixels on my screen. Seeing the image of the rice cake is not the same experience as eating the rice cake.

Another way of saying this is that, when you go to a restaurant, it's not enough to look at the menu. No matter how closely you read and re-read the menu, taking extensive notes, perhaps even calling the waiter over to ask many detailed questions about exactly how the various ingredients are combined in the dishes you're interested in, none of this will fill your belly. Reading the menu gives you some idea of what the meal may involve, but you still have to eat the actual food.

(Bear with me, this is going somewhere. I promise.)

The importance of view

We tend to think that we see the world as it is - that our eyes are like little windows looking out onto an objectively real, measurable, dependable universe. In fact, this seems so obvious that it's actually very hard to challenge, because the evidence is right there in front of your eyes.

Or is it?

The world I see is not necessarily the same as the world you see. For example, I'm a little bit blue-green colour-blind; assuming you aren't colour-blind in the same way, there are colours that look different to you but the same as each other to me. So we literally see different worlds. OK, you might say, but that's just because my eyes are defective whereas yours work properly, so you see things 'as they are' whereas I'm mistaken.

So here's another example - maybe you like aniseed (my partner does), but I really can't stand it. To her, aniseed tastes pleasant, but to me it tastes unpleasant. Where is the objective reality here? The standard way of explaining this one away is to say 'oh well, that's just a matter of taste', but that's really just sweeping the problem under the carpet - there's still an underlying view that aniseed has an objectively existing flavour, but somehow it's OK for two people to perceive that objectively real reality differently in this instance. Of course, often it really isn't OK to perceive objective reality differently from the social norm - for example, if I tried to tell you that the sky is green for me and the grass is blue, you'd think I had a problem with my eyes, or that I was 'losing touch with reality'.

Underlying all of this is a view - a basic underlying assumption about 'what's going on', or 'how reality is'. Our view gives us a kind of framework into which we can fit our many and varied perceptions of the world, and put together narratives to explain what's going on in terms that help us to understand the world around us and make effective choices. In order to live in a society with other people, it's helpful to have narratives that line up at least reasonably well with each other - allowing some wiggle room for 'matters of taste', so that the contradictions between those narratives aren't too unbearable or obvious. Where those narratives clash strongly, we see protests, wars, irreconcilable rifts in families.

The role of Zen practice is to challenge our underlying view, by asking us to look deeply into our experience and see the places where the view we developed through our childhood and adolescence isn't quite as accurate as we tend to assume. Seeing those holes in our picture of the world opens the door to new ways of seeing what's going on - ways which can transform our lives.

Understanding on the intellectual level versus the emotional level

Coming back to our painted rice cake, it's important to understand that I'm not talking about 'mere philosophy' here. Zen is not a collection of interesting ideas to add to your library and admire from afar. Zen practice only really works if it touches us deeply.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you behaved very differently from the way you thought you would behave in that situation? For example, maybe you decided to eat more healthily, and then found yourself in a shop buying chocolate. (This happens to me from time to time.) You'd certainly had the thought 'I'm going to eat more healthily', but somehow that thought hadn't penetrated down deep enough to change your behaviour.

A more poignant example comes from a philosopher who once described the moment at which he realised the superficiality of his lifelong philosophical endeavours. His particular area of expertise was in free will - the philosophical question of whether we choose our actions, or whether everything is merely some combination of determinism and randomness, which is strongly implied by the way we tend to understand physics. He subscribed to the latter view - that everything happens either because of inevitable cause-and-effect, or because it's simply random, with no 'choice' or 'intention' behind it - and had spent his life looking at the consequences of this, particularly in the moral domain. He pointed out that, if you really believe that free will is an illusion, then the concept of 'blame' doesn't make any sense: you can only hold someone 'responsible' for their actions (and thus blame them if they do bad things) if there was the possibly of their having done differently - if they'd had any choice in the matter.

He had thought quite deeply about this, and believed himself to be fully convinced that free will was an illusion, and that he had entirely let go of blaming others for their actions. He even said that he found this quite liberating. And then, one day, one of his children was attacked and badly beaten. In that moment of profound human suffering, he discovered that the urge to blame others for doing terrible things was still alive and well within him, and it had simply been buried under layers of intellectual sophistry.

Many of us come to Zen practice because we're looking to be changed by the process. But if the insights we discover remain merely at the intellectual level, we don't really change deep down. We admire the painting of the rice cake, but the deep nourishment of the meal never comes.

Insight: the 'understood experience'

My teacher's teacher on the Theravada side, Ayya Khema, liked to define spiritual insight as 'understood experience'. There are two aspects to this, and in the absence of either one, the insight doesn't fully materialise.

On one hand, there's the understanding. Without understanding, mere experience isn't really all that interesting. Sometimes we might have wild, crazy spiritual experiences from meditation practice - bliss, joy, seeing bright lights, becoming one with everything - but if we don't understand those experiences for what they are, then at best they'll have no impact on our underlying view, and at worst they might even confuse us more.

​On the other hand, we do need the experience. It isn't enough to read the menu. If all we do is think about our experience, we don't get down to the juicy stuff. Thinking about something removes us from that something, putting us at a distance from which we can survey it. Fortunately, thinking is not the only way to know our experience - we can also experience it directly. When you pick up a cup of tea, you don't need to think about it to know whether the cup is hot or cold; you know immediately, from the direct experience. It's a more immediate, intuitive kind of knowing than the intellectual kind - and for many of us it can take a while to get in touch with it, because we're so used to seeing the world through the filter of our thinking minds. But it's a necessary step on the road to insight.

Levels of understanding: from the superficial to the visceral

We can look at the development of understanding in Zen practice as a kind of progression. At first, even the ideas don't make any sense, because they're too far outside our current view. When asked to explain something about Zen, we might be able to parrot the words we read in a book, but there's no real understanding. Sometimes people seem content to remain at this level - perhaps because what they were really looking for was a community to hang out with, and they've learnt enough of the lingo to enjoy spending time with the other people in the group.

But many people are not content with simply being 'in the scene', and want to go deeper. So we start to think more carefully about the meaning behind the words in the books, trying to get a sense of what's being talked about. After a while, those ideas will start to make some intellectual sense, and we might now feel that we 'get it' - that we 'understand Zen', because we can articulate the concepts in our own words. But, on a deeper level, we don't really feel any different, and don't really see the big deal about all this Zen stuff. We might even become rather sceptical about Zen, because the teachers say it's this amazingly transformative thing, but we can't see the big deal about it. Why do they keep banging on about meditation? What can sitting there doing nothing give you that you can't get from reading books?

Still, if we persist with practice, and continue coming back to our immediate direct experience, as opposed to simply piling thoughts on top of more thoughts, we begin to see more clearly. We move beyond the intellectual sense of 'yeah, that makes sense' to a more immediate, visceral knowledge - in other words, we taste the food. When we come into contact with the 'taste' of direct experience, we open the door to insights that can begin to change our view, little by little.

Over time, those insights accumulate, until one day we reach a watershed moment when our view shifts substantially enough that we abruptly see reality in a whole new way. In Zen, this moment is called kensho (literally, 'seeing true nature'), because it's the moment when we realise the limitations of our old way of seeing things, and a world of possibility opens up for us. In early Buddhism, the moment is called stream entry, because we enter the stream that will lead us inevitably to full awakening - the total transformation of our view.

OK, so how do we do this?

All insight meditation practices are intended to bring about this kind of understood experience, in a variety of different ways. You can find a range of good insight practices on my Audio page. But, since I've been talking about thoughts and feelings in this article, here's another simple but profound practice which you can use to explore some of these ideas directly.

To begin, set yourself up in a comfortable meditation posture. You might like to take a few minutes simply following the breath, to allow the mind to settle so that you can see what's going on more clearly.

Then, take a look at your hand. (Either hand will do.) Think clearly to yourself: 'this is my hand, these are the fingers, I can bend and straighten them'. Then, bend and straighten your fingers, and pay attention to the physical sensations of moving your fingers, without thinking about it. Try this with eyes open (looking at the hand) and closed.

Go back and forth between thinking about your hand and feeling the sensations in your hand, many times. As you examine more closely you'll notice more subtle mental activity - not just the deliberate thinking that's part of the practice, but also other layers of thinking. You will likely also find that the sensations of the hand are more complex than they initially appeared - rather than simply a sensation of 'hand', there's 'hand' and 'fingers'; the 'fingers' have 'joints', and there are other physical sensations too, like a sense of the shape of the hand and its position in space relative to the rest of your body.

As the practice deepens, you may find that you reach a point where the difference between thoughts and physical sensations is crystal clear, beyond any doubt. However, don't be fooled - many times the thought will occur 'oh yeah, I get it now' and there will still be more to discover - so take your time over this. If you feel like you've figured the whole thing out after ten minutes, there's probably more to go!

Nonetheless, if you know with complete clarity which aspects of your experience of your hand are mental and which are physical, you can start to look at how the two aspects interoperate. What happens when you bend your finger? Is it purely a physical phenomenon, or is there an associated mental phenomenon? Does one precede the other, or do they arise together? And how can mental phenomena influence physical phenomena - where is the connection between them? Which of the phenomena is 'you' - the one who is choosing to bend and straighten the fingers, the one who is thinking the thoughts?

​Enjoy your meal!

This is the third of three articles heavily indebted to meditation teacher Shinzen Young, whose work you can find at https://www.shinzen.org/.

The problem of language

This is my second attempt to write this article. The first time around I decided to go with the more traditional term 'equanimity', which is the one that Shinzen uses to describe this particular skill. However, it wasn't working for me - the term has too much baggage, and when I found myself two paragraphs into the article still part-way through a definition, I threw in the towel.

So instead we're going to talk about 'acceptance' - which is also a term freighted with a variety of meanings, but I think it's easier to get where I want to go with 'acceptance' than 'equanimity'. Let's see how we get on.

Two ways we create problems for ourselves

Let's say I'm at the office, and a co-worker does something that irritates me a little bit. But I don't want to create a fuss and I don't like acknowledging my own anger, so instead I tell myself it's fine - I'm not really irritated, there's no anger present, it's fine. Then the next day it happens again, and again I squash the impulse. And the next day, and the next. Each time, I simply refuse to allow myself to experience what's going on in my body and mind; I close myself up, turn away from my own experience, and wait for it to go away.

While this might seem effective in the short term, after a while it's pretty likely that my irritation will start to grow. Maybe I start making passive-aggressive remarks, or whinging about my co-worker behind their back. They'll seem seem more and more irritating, and I'll have to squash that impulse more and more often, until one day all the pent-up anger finally explodes volcanically. I don't need to paint you a picture - we know that isn't going to be a pretty sight.

So maybe I decide that suppression isn't the right way to manage my anger. The next time my co-worker irritates me, I take that flicker of anger and run with it - I snarl at them, I demonstrate to everyone around me that I am a scary piece of work and you do not mess with me ever. This maybe even feels pretty good - acting out anger tends to give us a sense of personal power, and my co-worker will get the message pretty quickly that I'm not a fan of their behaviour.

On the other hand, after a while I notice people aren't coming by my desk quite so often, and I'm starting to get a reputation. I'm left off the invitation list for meetings where tact and diplomacy are required, because people know that I can't control my anger. Worse, if I really pay attention to what's going on, I might start to notice the harm that my expressions of anger are causing, but I'm powerless to do anything about it - after all, suppression didn't work, and the anger has to go somewhere, right? I'm an angry person, so what else can I do?

We can talk about these two strategies as 'suppression' - denying our experience, tightening up around it and ignoring what's going on - and 'reactivity' - allowing our experience to push us around, triggering behavioural patterns that play out automatically whenever the corresponding stimulus shows up in our lives.

Neither of these is particularly great. Suppression requires us to deny the truth of our own experience, and in the long term tends to lead to dramatic blow-ups when we get tired of pretending to be something we're not. On the other hand, reactivity leaves us at the mercy of our surroundings - something happens and BOOM, we're straight into playing out that behaviour, regardless of whether that's the most appropriate and useful thing to do in this situation. Every time we become reactive we actually lose control of our lives, at least for the moment.

So what do we do? Is there another approach? (Spoiler alert: yes.)

The third option: embodied acceptance, the attitude of non-resistance

In both of the strategies above, we started by treating the experience of negative emotion as a problem needing to be solved somehow. In the first case, we squashed it down so that we didn't have to feel it. In the second case, we acted it out, so that the emotion could be purged through our reactivity, in a kind of catharsis.

But what if we instead approached this emotion with acceptance? What if we recognised that this emotion is something that we've felt on and off since we were born, and will probably continue to feel on and off for the rest of our lives? What if, instead of treating the emotion as a problem to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible, we instead welcomed it into our bodies and allowed it to be there?

At this point, you might be thinking I'm crazy. Who wants to welcome anger into their body?

But, actually, making this deeply counterintuitive move has a surprising effect. When we turn fully towards the truth of our experience in this moment, allowing it to be exactly as it is, we find that it isn't actually so bad. Yes, it's probably quite unpleasant to feel a negative emotion like anger. But the unpleasant sensations of that anger aren't going to kill us. And, actually, if we allow them to be there, the additional unpleasantness of feeling like we have a problem that needs to be solved urgently simply vanishes. We no longer need to fix ourselves. We can simply be with the emotion, feeling it deeply without suppressing it and without acting it out.

As we start to investigate this pattern more widely, we see something else remarkable. Both suppression and reactivity are based on a kind of resistance - a deep-down sense that 'this shouldn't be happening'. But - to quote spiritual teacher Adyashanti - what you resist persists. In other words, the more we make our emotions (and other difficult experiences) into problems by denying and rejecting them, the worse they appear, and the larger they loom in our lives. Conversely, if we create an attitude of non-resistance, we actually don't experience so many things as problems in the first place.

So you're saying I should just accept everything, including injustice?

No. That would be silly.

'Acceptance' can sound passive, negative, defeatist or fatalist, like we simply lie down in the middle of the road and let life roll over us. To be clear, this is not what I am recommending.

The kind of acceptance I'm describing is present-moment acceptance. If I stub my toe, my foot hurts - that's how it works to have a foot and smash it into a solid object at high speed. Sometimes when I stub my toe, my first thought will be something like 'I wish I hadn't done that!' But that's a silly thought, because I have done it, and no amount of wishing that I hadn't will change that. Actually, wishing I hadn't stubbed my toe makes the whole thing worse, because now I'm putting energy into imagining a parallel reality where I was more careful, and compared to that, the present reality sucks. On the other hand, if I simply acknowledge the consequences of my clumsiness as the facts of the present situation, I don't have to deal with any of that unpleasant mental activity - there's just the physical sensation in my foot to deal with, and that will go away all by itself over time.

However, accepting the reality of the present moment doesn't mean that we can't make choices. Perhaps I notice that, in the present moment, my team's regular social events systematically exclude one member of the team with childcare responsibilities. Having noticed this, I'm perfectly at liberty to suggest that we vary our social calendar so that our colleague can be included in the future.

Creating an attitude of non-resistance

When we meditate, we can practise in a way which helps to set up this stance of non-resistance, and to reinforce it over time, so that we gradually move towards acceptance as our new default.

On the physical level, it helps to have good posture - a stable base, an upright spine - so that we can relax the body as much as possible. Emotional resistance and physical tension are closely linked - to the point that psychological wounds can show up in the body as patterns of 'stuck' tension - so encouraging ourselves to relax can help to move us toward a more open, accepting position.

On the mental level, the practice is primarily one of maintaining this attitude of welcoming our experience, no matter what it is. No matter what comes up in the practice, no matter how big a 'distraction' it might seem to be, it isn't 'wrong' and doesn't need to be pushed away or 'solved' somehow. We can allow whatever comes up to be there, and to be felt fully. This is especially true for difficult feelings - anger, fear, guilt, shame. These are probably never going to be pleasant parts of your experience, but they're valid parts of your experience, and have just as much right to be there as joy, love, peace and so on. So, rather than turning away from them, see if you can adopt an attitude of wanting to get to know them - to experience them fully.

To explore this in meditation, pick any mindfulness practice from the Audio page and just start going. Then, notice what comes up as you attempt to follow the instructions - and notice if you resent and resist the distractions that come up, or if you can allow them to be there, and even welcome them into your experience.

One final point is to notice spontaneous moments of acceptance, throughout the course of your daily life. Whenever you find yourself wrestling with some problem and then finally letting it go, notice the sense of freedom, openness and release that happens at that moment - the relief of no longer having to struggle with it. This moment of relief is present in every moment of true acceptance, and it feels great - so be sure to notice it! This engages what's called 'reward-based learning', which is how the brain creates habits - if you notice that, when you do something, it feels good, you're much more likely to do it again in the future (and conversely, if it feels bad, you're much less likely to do it again).

The path toward total freedom

We're now at a point where we can combine the three key meditative skills that we've discussed over these last few articles, and see how they can dramatically reduce the suffering in our lives. This example is a little tongue-in-cheek, and I wouldn't take the numbers too literally, but it does illustrate the way we can bring our meditative skills to bear on something which would previously have been totally overwhelming and make it much more manageable without going into denial or acting out.

Let's return to the example of dealing with an overwhelming unpleasant experience that we discussed in the article on sensory clarity. Suppose we have an experience which is unpleasant in every possible way (I'll leave it to you to come up with a suitably horrifying example):

1. Physical sensations: 10 units of unpleasantness
2. Emotional sensations: 10 units of unpleasantness
3. Sights: 10 units of unpleasantness
4. Sounds: 10 units of unpleasantness
5. Mental images: 10 units of unpleasantness
6. Mental talk: 10 units of unpleasantness

Without sensory clarity, we experience this as one giant hairball of nastiness, so the unpleasantnesses multiply together: 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 = 1,000,000 units of unpleasantness. Argh!

Now we bring sensory clarity to bear on the situation. We disentangle the hairball of horror into six strands of experience, each of which is individually unpleasant. We still have a lot of unpleasantness, but once the hairball is pulled apart into its separate strands, it doesn't look nearly so bad. Now the unpleasantnesses add together instead: 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 = 60 units of unpleasantness.

OK, getting there, but 60 units of badness is still more badness than I'd prefer to deal with. Fortunately, we can bring another skill to bear on the problem: concentration power. We can choose one of the six strands to focus on - let's say physical sensations. Now, instead of dealing with 60 units of unpleasantness, we only have to deal with 10, because our laser-like focus means that we can zoom in on the specific aspect of our experience that we want to work with, and let everything else fade into the background.

(It's important to note here that we're not using concentration to ignore this unpleasant experience. We're still turning toward the experience - we're simply using concentration to focus on part of the experience, to help reduce the risk of being overwhelmed.)

OK, so now we're down from a million units of unpleasantness to 10. Pretty good, right? But maybe we can still do better, using our newest meditative skill - acceptance.

As we've discussed, typically we tend to resist unpleasant experiences, and try to make them go away through suppression or reactivity. That resistance is itself unpleasant, and so makes a bad situation worse. Shinzen Young likes to say that 'suffering = pain x resistance', i.e. how bad we feel about a situation is not just a measure of how objectively bad it is, but also how much we're struggling against it.

So if you can bring deep acceptance to the unpleasant situation at hand, the pain might not decrease, but the resistance drops significantly, or can even vanish entirely.

​And if there's no resistance, there's no suffering.

This is the second of three articles heavily indebted to meditation teacher Shinzen Young, whose work you can find at https://www.shinzen.org/.

What is sensory clarity?

A key part of meditation and mindfulness - both the techniques themselves, and how they're used in the course of our lives - is to develop sensory clarity. When we see clearly, we can act wisely. The opposite of this clear seeing is confusion - being mistaken about what's going on, and acting from this place of misunderstanding. You can probably think of a time when you did something that seemed totally sensible at the time but turned out to be a big mistake, because you were mistaken about what was going on.

For example, I've noticed that when I have too much going on, and my stress levels cross a certain threshold, I tend to lose perspective on whether a problem is a big deal or a trifle. Before I noticed this pattern, I would take my assessment of the severity of the problem completely seriously - this seems like a disaster, so I'd better treat it like one! And then I'd wonder why nobody else could see this world-shattering disaster that I was grappling with. These days, I'm much more likely to notice when I'm in one of these slumps, and I know that my own judgement is probably a bit wonky, so I tend to ask a friend or colleague for their perspective before getting too invested in solving a problem that might actually not be worth the time and effort to resolve.

Sensory clarity can also help to increase our enjoyment of life. As we learn to tune in to our present-moment experience more precisely, our sensory experience comes alive - colours are more vibrant, scents and flavours richer and more interesting. Through meditation we can, in effect, learn to see the world in HD. (Maybe 4K is a better analogy these days!)

The meditative skill of sensory clarity has three major aspects, which we'll now consider in turn. We could give each aspect a few names; I've picked the ones starting with 'd' for all three, because I like alliteration, but I'll also offer an alternative in each case. The names don't really matter provided you get a general sense of the concepts behind them.

Distinguishing (resolution, discrimination)

(Hopefully it goes without saying, but 'discrimination' is intended in the sense of 'recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another', as opposed to 'prejudice'. Nevertheless, 'discrimination' has so much baggage attached to it that I'll stick with 'distinguishing' for now. If you're scientifically inclined, 'resolution' might also work for you. If it makes you think of how many pixels you can fit onto your screen, that's maybe not so helpful, because that's closer to another quality of sensory clarity, 'depth'.)

A key part of sensory clarity is to be able to make distinctions between different aspects of our experience. Often, we will experience a strongly negative situation as a kind of giant hairball of nastiness, where the whole thing is bad, and the badness seems huge and potentially even overwhelming. But if we look more closely, we can start to break it down into its components.

One way of doing this looks at our experience as being made up of these six aspects:

1. Physical sensations (body sensations like temperature and pressure, scents, flavours etc.)
2. Emotional sensations (e.g. the butterflies in the stomach associated with fear, the burning in the chest associated with anger)
3. Sights (all visual experiences; whatever we can see around us)
4. Sounds (all auditory experiences; whatever we can hear around us)
5. Mental talk (thinking in words and sounds)
6. Mental images (thinking in pictures)

(If that list seems incomplete to you, this might be an interesting subject of contemplation for a meditation practice...)

So part of the art of clear seeing is being able to distinguish these different aspects of our experience. If we do this, that giant hairball of nastiness starts to break down into several strands of nastiness - and some of the power of that unpleasantness falls away. Shinzen Young likes to say that when we see a situation without clarity, it's like the unpleasantness multiplies - so if you have 10 units of unpleasant physical sensation, 10 units of unpleasant emotional sensation, and so on across the six categories, you end up with 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 x 10 = 1,000,000 units of unpleasantness. Gah! But if you see a situation with clarity - seeing the physical sensations as physical sensations, the mental talk as mental talk, and the two being separate - then it's more like the unpleasantness adds together, so instead you end up with 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 = 60 units of unpleasantness. A reduction from one million to sixty - not bad!

The key point here is that we become overwhelmed by an experience precisely at the point when we lose our sensory clarity - when we can no longer distinguish the different threads of our experience from one another. At that moment, we shift from 'this part of my experience is bad' to 'everything is bad', and that's too much to handle all at once. By training in sensory clarity, we can maintain this distinguishing ability in more difficult circumstances, and thus it takes more to overwhelm us.

Detection (sensitivity)

The second component of sensory clarity is how able you are to detect the various comings and goings in your experience.

Suppose you're trying to detect communications from aliens in outer space. So you get a big dish and point it straight up, and then listen to see what you can pick up. The trouble is, the aliens are probably far away, so maybe their signals are really faint. If your receiver is quite noisy, you might miss the signal because it's swamped by noise. On the other hand, maybe the aliens communicate via Galactic Twitter, so their signals are very short-lived. If your receiver is only switched on occasionally, or if it takes you a couple of minutes to notice the signal coming in, you'll probably miss them because they came and went before you realised what was happening.

In a similar way, many of the sensations that make up our experience are either faint, short-lived, or both, and as a result, we don't notice them at the conscious level. However, our bodies are much more switched on than our conscious minds, so we tend to pick up a huge amount of information unconsciously. If you've ever found yourself feeling a bit down after spending a few days around someone who's constantly complaining about everything, you might not be able to pinpoint a specific moment when your mood changed for the worse, but you've clearly been influenced by that drip, drip, drip of negativity nonetheless.

I borrowed another catch-phrase from Shinzen Young for the subtitle of this article: 'What is trackable is tractable.' In other words, when large parts of our experience are totally unconscious, it's very difficult for us to work with that material in a conscious way, because we don't even know it's there. People who meditate for a while often find themselves noticing unhelpful patterns of behaviour coming to light which they'd never consciously recognised before; until that happens, there's no way to change that pattern of behaviour for the better, because you literally have no idea it's happening.

So improving our detection capabilities is another major asset, both for our meditation practice and our lives - as we become more aware of what's going on, we bring light to previously dark corners of our experience.

Depth (penetration)

The final quality of sensory clarity is depth, which is essentially the thoroughness with which the details of an experience are perceived.

A new meditator trying out mindfulness of breathing for the first time may well experience the breath at a largely conceptual level. 'Breathing in now... Breathing out now... Breathing in now... Breathing out now...' As the depth of sensory clarity increases, the meditator will start to notice the physical body sensations making up the breath, which are much richer and more complex than the simple sense of 'breathing in, breathing out'. And as clarity increases still further, the meditator will start to find that those physical sensations are constantly changing, moment to moment, in a beautiful, ungraspable, dance-like flow.

In a sense, depth and detection go hand-in-hand, because as the depth of our clarity increases, we will start to detect more and more in our experience; and as we detect more and more, we have further opportunities to increase the depth of our clarity.

We can look at this like our experience is a deep lake, witnessed on a dark night. At first, maybe we can only see what's right on the surface; nearly the whole lake is hidden from view. Then we switch on a torch, and point it at the water. Now the surface is illuminated, and we can maybe see a little way below the surface as well - so some of what was previously unknown to us now starts to become available, although it's still indistinct. As our torch becomes stronger and brighter, we can see further and further down into the lake, maybe eventually reaching all the way to the bottom.

Practising sensory clarity

Any time you're looking at your immediate sensory experience, with the intention of seeing in detail what's going on, you're practising sensory clarity. If you find it helpful to break things down in terms of the six categories described above, great, but if trying to hold a list in your head while practising gets in the way, it's not necessary. Simply keep coming back to the present moment each time the mind wanders away, and endeavour to be specific about what's going on.

Much like the way that concentration power (see the previous article) can be developed either with a narrow focus or a broad focus, we can also bring sensory clarity to all aspects of our experience, great or small. Many people like to work with the breath, because it's easy to find and doesn't need any external props or setup time, and it's constantly changing so there's endless richness to be explored. Alternatively, if you'd rather go for a broader focus, you could work with the sensations of the whole body, or even the total field of awareness. My Audio page has guided practices for mindfulness of breathing and open awareness to help you get started.

This article, and the next two, are heavily indebted to meditation teacher Shinzen Young, whose work you can find at https://www.shinzen.org/.

What is meditative concentration?

One of the key skills that we develop through meditation practice is the ability to direct our attention where we want it to go, when we want it to go there. This skill is often called 'concentration', although that word is tricky for a lot of people, as we'll see below. For now, though, I'll keep using it anyway, for the sake of using standard terminology.

So when we 'concentrate', in the meditative sense, we're generally separating our experience into two components: the part of our experience that we're choosing to pay attention to, and everything else. We then focus on the relevant part, and set everything else to one side for the time being.

A common meditation - and one which is often given to beginners, but please don't think of it as a 'beginner practice', because it can be incredibly profound - is to pay attention to the breath. You breathe in, you breathe out, and you notice the physical sensations of the breath. Every time the mind wanders away from the breath - when you start thinking about what you're going to do later, or get distracted by a sound outside the room - you gently bring the attention back to the breath. Simple, right? (If you'd like to give this a try, there are guided breath meditations on my Audio page.)

Concentration in practice

In practice, most people quickly find that the mind doesn't want to stay put. In fact, as Zen teacher Katsuki Sekida wrote in his 1975 'Zen Training': "Any beginner who has tried [breath counting] for the first time must have experienced this failure and been surprised by his inability to control his thoughts as he wanted. Some readers may find this hard to believe. Then they should try it themselves, and they will say, 'Indeed!' and say to themselves, 'This won't do.'"

On the other hand, many of us have had at least glimpses of what it can be like to be totally focused on something. Athletes call it being 'in the zone', and psychologist Mihaly Csizszentmihalyi coined the term 'Flow' to describe it. This condition has now been studied quite a lot, and as a result we can say some things about what it's like to be highly concentrated with great confidence.

1. It's rewarding.

People who experience flow generally want to experience it again and again. When we're fully engaged with something, all of the usual mental chatter falls away, and we're left with a pristine experience of total immersion which flows (hence the name) from one moment to the next.

In fact, happiness researchers have shown that people tend to report higher levels of subjective well-being (i.e. they feel better) when focused on what they're doing, compared to when distracted. Perhaps more surprisingly, the level of focus is a better predictor of happiness than the type of activity being undertaken. This is great news, because it means that we don't need to wait for ideal external conditions in order to be happy. We can actually improve our happiness by paying attention to whatever we're doing.

2. It's effective.

When we're completely focused on what we're doing, we tend to do a better job. Being distracted from the task at hand is clearly a recipe for mistakes, but so is focusing more on the outcome of the task than the task itself. When we're fully present for what we're doing, we notice more details and can respond better to the particulars of what's happening, and this makes for better results.

Some misconceptions about concentration

1. If you're not 100% focused on the breath, you're doing it wrong and wasting your time.

This is probably the single biggest misconception about meditation in general, never mind concentration practice. I've lost count of the number of people who've complained that they're unable to stop their mind wandering when they meditate.

Mind wandering is part of the practice. The mind simply doesn't stay put, at least until you're advanced enough that you probably aren't reading this article. But the mind-wandering is actually a great opportunity, because each time it wanders we can notice that it's wandered, and return our attention to the object of focus. Doing this repeatedly encourages our attention to stay put for progressively longer stretches of time, and we also get better at spotting the wandering, so we notice and come back sooner. Eventually you may reach a point where you can see the mind starting to wobble, and catching it before it wanders away. Now that's a high level of skill!

2. Concentration means actively suppressing everything else.

Please don't do this. Trying to play whack-a-mole with wandering thoughts is not only futile, but it actually makes matters worse. Our minds are busy because we're constantly filling them with stuff, until there's so much pressure that random thoughts can't help but leak out all day long. Trying to suppress those wandering thoughts actually adds more pressure to the system, shaking things up even more. Talk about counter-productive!

To borrow an image from Shinzen Young, you can give the spotlight to one dancer without pushing all the other dancers off the stage. That's what we're doing here: spotlighting some part of our experience, and simply leaving the rest of it alone.

3. Concentration involves a ton of effort.

Not really. It does take some effort to learn a new skill, or to improve an existing one, but you don't need a furrowed brow and tensed muscles to concentrate. Unfortunately the word 'concentration' implies effort for many people, so sometimes I'll explore other terms with them, like 'stability', 'resting', 'focus', or my teacher Leigh's preferred term, 'indistractibility'.

When you're doing the practice, each time the mind wanders away and you come back again, that process of 'recommitting' to the object does take a little bit of energy, and you'll probably find that your concentration is worse at the end of a long day when you're tired. But, over time, your baseline level of concentration - i.e. how indistractible you are in the course of your daily life - will increase, so you'll find yourself becoming steadily more focused without applying any conscious effort.

4. Concentration means focusing on something small.

It's pretty common for concentration practices to be taught using a small area of focus, such as the sensations of breathing at the nostrils. Focusing on a small area can be a nice way to train concentration for many people, because it's crystal clear when you're focusing and when your attention has wandered.

On the other hand, some people find too narrow an area of focus to be tight or confining, and that they do much better with a broader area of focus, such as the breath in the belly, or even the sensations of the whole body. For the ultimate in 'broad focus', you can even rest in open awareness, experiencing all sensations freely without focusing in on anything in particular. (Again, you'll find a guided open awareness practice on the Audio page.)

It's also a good idea to step outside your comfort zone once in a while. If you mostly work with the breath at the nostrils, try working with the whole body, or open awareness. And vice versa. Challenge yourself!

5. Concentration means keeping your attention on one fixed point for a long period of time.

Although many concentration practices do aim to cultivate stable, unmoving attention - 'one-pointed', as it's called in the tradition - we can also cultivate another kind of concentration, called 'moment-to-moment'. This means that, in any given moment, we have a high degree of focus on one particular sensation, but in a subsequent moment we might move to another sensation, with an equally high degree of focus.

For example, in the popular body scan practice, your attention moves around the body in a methodical way, spending a few seconds in each location. Wherever your attention is, you focus deeply on the physical sensations at that place - so, in that moment, that particular area of the body is very much in the spotlight, and everything else is out of it - but the spotlight is moving from place to place, rather than resting in one place for half an hour. (This practice is definitely worth trying too; you can find a couple of guided body scans on the Audio page.)

Building concentration power, your way

Actually, all meditation practices cultivate concentration power, so there's no need to practise in a special way; simply focus on whatever practice you're doing, and keep coming back to the practice each time your mind wanders.

That said, if you want to turbo-charge your concentration skills, you can work in a way which emphasises concentration and downplays everything else. The basic instructions for a pure concentration practice are simple:

1. Pick an object
2. Notice the sensations in your experience which correspond to that object
3. Each time the mind wanders away, gently bring the attention back to the object
4. Do nothing else

As for the object, you can pick anything at all, internal or external. The breath is a very common one, but some people like to use candles, sounds, mantras... There's a traditional list of 40 objects of meditation (many of which are pretty grim - take a look!), but feel free to get creative and use whatever you prefer. I suggest you try fairly simple, unchanging objects, because if you pick something too dynamic and 'interesting' then it's too easy to stay focused and you aren't really building the skill. (It doesn't take much effort to get absorbed in a good movie, but it also doesn't really train your indistractibility - if it did, we'd all be masters by now...)

So give it a go, and see how you get on!

​I've been teaching a weekly class for about two and a half years now, and over that time my class plans have gotten progressively more detailed and unwieldy. It's getting to the point that I often don't have enough time to say everything I've planned to, which cuts into meditation time. In a meditation class, that's... less than ideal.

Recently, there have been a few occasions when I haven't used the class plan, and have instead just followed the usual class outline (opening sit, talk, movement, closing sit) without any notes to back me up. It's been nice - I'm not so tied to my iPad, and I don't overrun because I shut up when it's time for the movement practice.

On the other hand, I kinda like planning. I spend a lot of time on it. Often, I'll do some research. And I'm just not interesting enough to speak extemporaneously every single week without any kind of prep work. Also, from time to time I've shared previous class plans with people and they've been useful, so it's nice to have something written down.

So the new plan is that, once a week, I'll write an article for this blog, and save it as a draft. Then I'll use that as the basis for the talk that week, and finally publish the article after the class has happened (so no spoilers). Maybe that will be of interest to people who can't make it along to the physical classes. It'll also allow me to exercise another of my passions (I like writing but don't find time for it any more), and it'll add a bit more of my personality to what is otherwise a fairly bland website (which might be good or bad, depending on your taste...).

That's the experiment; what's the caveat?

A question I've considered a lot lately is: 'Who am I to be teaching people about Zen?' I've been practising for about twelve years (I'm not sure exactly when I started), and I've had a certain amount of experience over those twelve years, but I regularly meet people with thirty or forty years of practice experience, compared to which I've barely begun. I'm nothing special, and, as keen as I am to share the practices that have been so valuable for me, I do sometimes wonder if calling myself a teacher is just a giant ego trip.

Still, people keep coming to my classes, so evidently at least some people get some value out of them, and perhaps by posting articles here, a few more people will benefit too. For my part, I'll do my best to give credit where it's due, rather than try to pass off the words of the great Zen masters as my own ideas - hopefully I won't pollute their teachings too much as I put them into my own words.

New articles will be posted most Thursdays, assuming I wrote something new that week and didn't have one of my improv sessions instead.

I hope you find something of value in these writings.

Sometimes in meditation we come into contact with critical aspects of ourselves - facets of our mind which have strong opinions about what we should be doing, how well we're doing those things, and so on. Some of these 'voices', as we'll call them, can be highly critical. This is actually so common in modern society that there's a name for this phenomenon: the 'inner critic'.

When we encounter a harsh inner critic, the temptation is either to believe the negative messages it's telling us, or to turn away and refuse to listen to it at all. However, there's a third option, based in mindfulness: turning toward the voice non-judgementally, and actually seeing what it has to say - getting to know it better, if you like.

It often helps to give the voice a name. You might find it helpful to pick a light-hearted name, because it helps to take what the voice is saying less seriously - 'Oh look, Mr Grumpy is grumbling about something again.' For me, I've identified a few different voices within myself which want slightly different things, so I've given them names accordingly - for example, part of me really wants everything to be perfect all the time, as if I'm going to be 'inspected' at any moment. This reminds me a lot of being an army cadet on camp when you literally could be inspected at any moment, so I call that voice 'Drill Sergeant'.

Having identified and named the voice, the next stage is to get to know it. This might seem daunting, and it's definitely worth proceeding slowly and carefully. If it ever gets too difficult, come completely out of the practice and do something else for a while - go for a walk, watch a funny cat video on YouTube, whatever it takes to blow out the cobwebs.

But a key point to understand is that, once upon a time, these voices were probably just trying to help. Maybe something happened that upset you, and so part of you made a mental note and said 'Right, let's never do that again.' But then it happened again anyway, maybe a few times - and this part of you that was trying to protect you started shouting louder and louder, trying to make itself heard, trying to keep you safe. Unfortunately, over time this became more and more severe, and has now become completely twisted, so we end up with these internal voices criticising our every move and constantly yelling at us, and it can be very difficult to detect any hint of kindness or good intention in what's being said.

So the idea with identifying, naming and then getting to know these critical inner voices is so that they can actually be heard. The inner critic is often so harsh because it's been ignored or avoided for so long. Turning toward it, really listening not just to what it's saying but actually asking it why it's saying those things, can begin to transform your relationship to it. Over time we can actually befriend these parts of ourselves, and the harsh, stinging nature of the criticism will gradually lessen.

It's really important to say that I'm not a trained therapist/counsellor or a medical professional, and severe situations might well need the support of a trained professional. On the other hand, these techniques have been used by many meditators successfully for a long time, so it's certainly worth giving them a shot to see what happens - you might just discover a kinder relationship to yourself, and find some relief from that inner critic. Just remember, as ever, to proceed slowly and gently, and stop at once if it gets too overwhelming.

Three levels of practice, three levels of awakening

Meditation practice can work on three levels - mind, heart and body. Different people will be drawn to different approaches; you’ll find that you get on much better with some techniques than others. In addition, sometimes working on one level can help to get past an inner block or difficulty that practices on another level haven’t been able to resolve - for example, a deep-seated anxiety that no amount of mental training has been able to shift might be resolved by doing some work with the body.

So let’s take a look at the three levels of practice and see what each might offer us!

The mind

The mind is an incredibly powerful resource if we can learn to harness it. It can also be a huge source of problems!

We can use meditation to train the mind in a couple of helpful ways:

- Focus. Many meditation practices use an object (sometimes called an ‘anchor’) to train the mind to focus. For example, we might pay attention to the breath, to a candle flame, or to a visualisation. Each time we notice that the mind has wandered away, we bring the attention gently back to the anchor. Over time, our attention becomes clearer, sharper and less unruly, and our minds become calmer and quieter.

- Insight. By looking closely at our moment-to-moment experience, we begin to see how the mind actually works - the endless loops of habitual thinking, the deep-seated patterns of behaviour which drive more of our actions than we might like. Over time we see deeper and deeper into the mind, and ultimately we come to discover who we really are, beyond all the ideas and stories we carry around. We come to see ourselves not as a solid, separate thing in a world of things, but as a fluid process in a world of processes. This shift of perspective, called kensho in Zen, brings great freedom and joy into our lives.

We awaken at the level of the mind when we bring stillness and clarity to our minds and see what’s really going on - we find new ways of relating to our experience which bring profound freedom from stress, anxiety and suffering.

The heart

Life is ultimately all about relationships; we exist in relation to our friends, families, co-workers and neighbours, and the quality of our lives can be measured in the quality of those relationships.

With this in mind, we can use meditation to open our hearts and connect with beautiful qualities of warmth and peace that are innate to our being but all too often buried under a lifetime of conditioning and pain.

Within ourselves, we find an inner reservoir of kindness and love, which is simply the natural expression of an open heart. When that open-hearted quality encounters suffering, it takes on the form of compassion - the earnest wish that the suffering be relieved. When an open heart encounters joy, it resonates in delight, whether that joy is found in ourselves or in another. And as we learn to settle into the experience of an open heart, we find the unshakeable peace of equanimity, a kind of inner stability from which we can view the comings and goings of the world without getting sucked into its drama against our will.

Through heart practices, we learn to extend these qualities toward the people around us, and also to ourselves - either or both of these can sadly be difficult at first, but with time and gentle practice the heart will respond. Initially it may be easier to feel or express these qualities toward some people (such as close friends) and harder towards others (the more difficult people in our lives, perhaps), but as the heart practices develop we find that a shift takes place - a breaking down of barriers, where we move beyond the mind’s categorisations of self and other, good and bad, friend and foe - and these beautiful qualities of the heart radiate out in all directions, equally and impartially. This radiant heart will inevitably enrich our lives and our relationships, as its warmth touches every person we encounter.

The body

The third dimension of meditation practice is the physical body. Perhaps you’re already a physical person - an athlete, a dancer, an artisan - or perhaps you work at a computer all day long, but either way your body is the instrument through which you experience the world and express your innermost thoughts, intentions and desires.

The body, heart and mind are intimately connected. If we experience a lot of anxiety, that will tend to show up in the body as patterns of tension, stiffness and discomfort. And as we work with the body, we can often find strong memories or emotions bubbling up to the surface. Gently opening and aligning the body will often cause the release of mental or emotional blockages which are difficult to approach on the level of the mind or the heart.

Beyond the purely physical, we can also work with the body’s energetic system. There are many different traditions and practices for working with energy, such as kundalini yoga, qigong, or the energetic practices found in Rinzai Zen. These practices give us a way to connect with our bodies at the subtlest levels, to explore what’s going on inside us and work with areas of tension and blockage.

Body-based approaches also provide us with a bridge between meditation practices for the mind and heart, which are often carried out in stillness, and the rest of our lives, which are often filled with movement and activity. Bringing mindful attention and an open heart to a physical practice such as yoga, tai chi or running is a very powerful way of integrating all aspects of our spiritual lives, and allowing the benefits that we experience in formal meditation to infuse our daily lives and activities.

Bringing it together

Ultimately we must explore and integrate all three levels - mind, heart, and body. All three are connected: you might well find that experiencing kensho allows your heart to open naturally; that working with self-compassion helps to soften and relax tension in the body; or that aligning and opening the body naturally brings your mind to rest and allows you to see much more clearly than before. Or you might find that these are three separate paths of exploration, each of which will bring different discoveries and rewards - each bringing openings on different levels. Either way, however, awakening is most powerful when it unites wisdom and compassion in a fully embodied way.

So don’t be a one-dimensional practitioner! What might you be leaving out? What approaches could you explore to find new openings in your practice?

A common theme in Buddhist practice, including Zen, is what the earliest texts call 'dukkha'. The most common translation of this Pali term is 'suffering', but sometimes that word doesn't work so well for people - it can come across as pretty drab and heavyweight, like you need to be living in a Greek tragedy in order to qualify. A more modern term that's become quite popular is 'stress', but that comes with some other connotations and can make the whole thing sound a bit like a psychological therapy, which isn't quite what we're getting at in Zen. Personally, I quite like another term that I first encountered in the Chan (Chinese Zen) tradition - 'vexations'. From time to time, we all get vexed. We can all think of that one person who's... well, vexing.

People come to Zen practice for a variety of reasons. One common motivation is an excess of vexation: they find, for whatever reason, that life just isn't really working for them, and they want a way out, something to alleviate the suffering. This is the Buddha's own story: he looked at what life had in store for him - old age, sickness and death - and decided he didn't fancy it much, so set off to explore the spiritual path and see what could be done about it.

Not everyone comes to practice through being excessively vexed, of course. For some people it's more about curiosity, a sense of exploration, of wanting to know what's going on - this meditation thing seems to do something, but what? What do these cryptic texts actually mean? (That's been my primary motivation for practice.) And, of course, there are many other reasons too.

Whatever the motivation to practice, however, sooner or later we run into vexation and have to learn to deal with it. The mind spends a lot of time bouncing from one vexation to another, driven by preferences - a process of categorising our experience into things that we like (and hence want more of) and things we don't like (and hence want to get away from). This process is so deeply ingrained that it actually colours our very perception of the world, making the good things appear more attractive than they are, and the bad things more repulsive. So we're being constantly pushed and pulled around by these preferences, with the mind rarely given a moment's rest.

Allowing the mind to come to rest is an interesting experience. When the mind becomes still enough, we can temporarily drop the preferences colouring our perception. When that happens, we see 'things as they are', to use the traditional phrase - this moment appears to us without any sense of lack or insufficiency, any sense that it needs to be in any way different. This sense that things are fine just as they are, of wishlessness, develops into a feeling of profound contentment, a deep source of inner well-being which is not at all dependent on anything outside of ourselves. Sometimes in the Zen literature you'll see descriptions of reality appearing as spontaneously 'perfected' - perfect not in the sense that it glows and shoots rainbows, but in the sense that we truly experience the world as not needing to be different in any way, but rather to be completely and wholly fine just as it is - in other words, perfect.

So this gives a sense of one way the path of Zen can unfold. We begin by understanding what gives rise to vexations; only then can we begin to learn how to be free of those vexations. And then as the mind progressively lets go of vexation and settles into stillness, an experience of life that is rich and full, yet fundamentally peaceful and contented, becomes increasingly available to us.

If this sounds interesting, I'd like to suggest a practice that you can use to explore these themes - Zen is first and foremost about direct experience, not about ideas and philosophical arguments. So let's take a look at one way we can explore the mind's tendency to become agitated and see if we can find ways to relax and let go into peace and stillness.

One of the first meditation techniques I ever learnt is called Silent Illumination in the Chan tradition, more commonly known from Japanese Zen as 'just sitting' or shikantaza. In the Chan style, the practice begins by slowly sweeping your attention down the body, from the top of the head to the soles of the feet, relaxing any tension in each part of the body as the attention moves through that region. This helps the body to become still, which in turn helps the mind to become still. The whole process should take at least a few minutes, depending on how long you have to practise. When you've finished releasing tension, you then bring the attention to the body as a whole. The body is still, in a sitting posture; the mind is clearly aware that the body is sitting. And that's it. The 'silence' of Silent Illumination is the stillness of body and mind - whatever comes up (thoughts, sounds, bodily sensations, emotions), we don't get involved with it; we're simply aware of the body, sitting. But it isn't a dull or stagnant silence, a zoning out or switching off. Rather, the awareness is clear and bright - we know very precisely that the body is sitting, and that's the illumination aspect, the clarity which balances the stillness.

That's the basic practice. It may be that as the practice develops (or if you've done this kind of thing a lot already, it might happen almost immediately), it starts to feel a bit narrow and confining keeping the attention on the physical body. If so, it's okay to allow the awareness to expand to take in the whole environment; you can think of the whole environment as 'the body, sitting' and simply rest with that. (At this point the practice is essentially the same as the open awareness practice on the Audio page of this website.) But there's no need to rush to get to 'stage 2' of the practice - whether the focus is on the physical body or open to the whole environment, the skills of silence and illumination being trained are exactly the same. Neither approach is better or worse, they're just different expressions of the same fundamental experience.

Silent Illumination is a very 'complete' practice, in the sense that it develops concentration, insight and equanimity in equal measure, and once you have a taste for the attitude of allowing the mind to be still even in the midst of distraction and activity, you can bring that more and more into daily life, where it really delivers its greatest value. If you're temperamentally suited to this kind of practice it's a great way to go. It doesn't suit everyone, however; some people find that they prefer more 'active' practices such as self-inquiry, for example. As with anything in meditation, it's vital that you explore new practices with an open mind and be as honest with yourself as you possibly can. So give it a try and see how you get on!

A question that often comes up when teaching mindfulness to beginners is 'Do I really need to meditate, or can I just be mindful all the time instead?'

Before answering this, it's worth saying that some teachers use these terms interchangeably, so to be clear I'll say how I'm using them. When I refer to 'meditation' I mean a formal practice in which we set aside a period of time to sit, stand, lie down or walk in a specific way, engaging with a particular meditation technique such as following the breath or paying attention to bodily sensations. I'm using 'mindfulness' to mean 'the awareness which arises when paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally', which is how mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn defines it in his book Full Catastrophe Living.

One of the motivations for practising meditation is to develop the skill of mindfulness, which we can then begin to integrate into our daily lives. So the question is essentially asking if we can skip the first step and go straight to being mindful in daily life, without the need to meditate at all. Sometimes the question is phrased a bit differently, like 'Can I meditate during my walk to work?', and sometimes it's phrased more as a statement, like 'I don't need to meditate because I walk my dogs mindfully.'

So, how about it? Do you actually need to meditate or is off-cushion mindfulness enough by itself?

Personally, I'm a big fan of starting with meditation and then gradually bringing mindfulness into daily life. That's how I teach, and that's the approach that seems to work best for most people - even the ones who are convinced they 'can't meditate'!

Practising mindfulness in daily life is extremely valuable, and at some point becomes vital if you want to bring the skills you're developing on the cushion into the hurly-burly of daily life, which is where they'll be the most useful. However, in the modern world with its oh-so-many distractions, so much to do and so many things on our minds, paying attention to the present moment without wandering off in thought doesn't come naturally to most people, and it's typically much more difficult to remain mindful while moving through your daily activities because there's usually so much to think about, or at least that's how it seems.

So, even if you find meditation difficult initially, you'll probably find it much easier to use meditation to develop a solid foundation in mindfulness, in the same way that it's easier to learn a language if you start with some simple phrases and exercises rather than jumping straight into fluent conversation with a native speaker.

Indeed, many people find that after they've been meditating for a few weeks, they seem to find it harder to stay in the present moment without wandering off into distraction. Believe it or not, this is actually a good sign! A big part of the process of meditation is becoming more aware of what's going on in our minds, and the often surprising discovery of how unaware we were beforehand. After some practice we start to notice just how often the mind does wander. Again, this is much harder to see if you jump straight into mindfulness in daily life without ever sitting quietly in meditation. Unfortunately, this can sometimes lead people to believe that they're mindfulness experts simply because they're largely unaware of how often they're distracted!

In the interests of balance, it's worth saying that some people do develop great mindfulness without ever meditating. Elite athletes, skilled artisans and so on often describe their state of mind when engaged in their particular activity of expertise in a way that sounds remarkably like a high level of mindfulness. And if that approach really does work for you, that's great, and please don't let me stop you. But do consider whether this really is true, or whether it's just possible that your mindfulness would benefit from a formal meditation practice as well.

The progression that I recommend is for people to start off with a mindfulness-based meditation practice that they find appealing - some people like the body scan, some people like breath counting or following, some people like open awareness (guided meditations for all of these are available on the Audio page) - and spend a couple of weeks practising that to start to get a feel for what it means to be mindful.

Once you've built up some foundation in mindfulness through meditation, you can start to introduce it into daily life. It's usually best to start with one or two specific activities in your daily routine - for example, brushing your teeth, or washing the dishes (or loading the dishwasher!) - and try to do just those activities as mindfully as possible each day, until it becomes a habit, then add some more activities, and so on. Trying to go straight to 'being mindful' all day long is usually a recipe for frustration. Start small, build up, and keep going - over time you'll find mindfulness coming more often and more naturally, and the benefits becoming increasingly integrated into your daily life.

Good luck!

Over the last few entries in this blog, we've talked about a range of different meditation techniques. We've looked at mindfulness of breath and body, the cultivation of loving kindness and compassion, self-inquiry as a route to meditative insight, the development of mental stability and stillness, and open awareness as a way of 'being, not doing'.

When there are so many possibilities for practice, how do we decide what to do with our practice time? For some people it can be daunting even to get started - what happens if we pick the wrong technique? Should we practise just one technique, or several? And how long for - how much is 'enough'?

As I've said before, meditation is one of the most personal and individual activities you will ever undertake. As a teacher I can offer suggestions for how to practise, but ultimately the real power in this process comes when you start to figure out for yourself what works for you and what doesn't. There are really very few hard-and-fast rules about how to do this stuff - 'some' is better than 'none', and that's about it!

That being said, I'll give some suggestions here for how you might start to explore meditation practice. If you've never meditated before, I'd suggest it's worth trying a range of different techniques, to see what works for you and what doesn't feel like such a good fit right now. On my beginners' course we spend a week on each of six practices - mindfulness of the breath, the body scan, metta and compassion, self-inquiry, concentration and open awareness. (The links here take you to blog posts talking about each practice and providing some wider context.)

I'd suggest spending at least a week on each practice, rather than dropping them after a day or two. All meditation techniques take a while to get used to, and it might be that it takes you a few tries to get into the groove of a particular practice.

You can also use these first few weeks to explore how meditation fits into your life. Are you a morning person or an evening person? Are you better off finding ten or fifteen minutes in the middle of the day, perhaps during a lunch break if you're an office worker? Most people find it helpful to have a specific time each day when they practise, so it becomes part of your daily routine, like brushing your teeth.

How long should you practise? Well, how long do you have? Five minutes is infinitely better than nothing! Even short sessions like this produce noticeable benefits given time. Ten minutes is at least twice as good as five minutes, of course. If you have longer, could you try sitting for twenty minutes, or half an hour? However, it's probably worth starting small and building up, rather than trying to jump straight into two-hour daily sits and giving up immediately. Trying to force yourself to sit for twenty minutes every day when you can really only honestly fit in ten minutes is usually counterproductive - at some point you'll start skipping days, and soon you won't be practising at all. The key thing is to do some practice, no matter how much, and keep doing it. That's all. If you can do that, you're on the right road!

So once you've figured out how to fit meditation into your day, and you've got a sense for which techniques work, how should you use the time you have?

Again, there's no one 'right answer', just some loose guidelines based on what I and others have found to be helpful. Any of the practices I've listed above have the potential to transform your life over time, so feel free to go with whatever speaks to you (although see the caveat below about concentration meditation).

I'll suggest three common ways to structure your practice which you might find helpful.

1. Pick one technique that you like and do that every day.

This is a great way to go - as the saying goes, it's better to dig one deep hole than lots of shallow ones. The only caveat here is that concentration practice shouldn't be the only meditation you ever do, since this can sometimes lead to a kind of avoidance strategy where we use our powers of concentration to turn away from our problems rather than dealing with them, and this can result in people disconnecting from their lives in a way that isn't helpful.
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2. Pick a few techniques and cycle through them.

Perhaps you could do mindfulness of the breath on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and metta on Tuesdays, Thursdays and the weekend. Or maybe spend a week on one, then a week on another, and so on.

This can be a nice way to keep your practice fresh and interesting if you find that focusing on one technique gets boring quickly. Be careful that you don't jump around too much, however. Some of the modern meditation apps offer a constant stream of new guided practices, which can seem great at first, but actually tends to turn meditation into a kind of entertainment where there's always a new 'episode' to consume. The real power of meditation comes from consistently applying a technique to build skills and capacities within yourself, rather than simply entertaining yourself for ten minutes each day. (That's not to say that entertainment is a bad thing! But we're trying to do something different here.)

3. Use a specific sequence of techniques each time you sit.

For a long time, my own daily practice started with a few minutes of metta to open the heart, went into concentration practice for roughly half the remaining time to settle the mind, and then on to an insight practice for the final portion. Clearly it's helpful to have slightly longer sits if you want to use several techniques in a session - I was sitting around forty minutes each day at the time - and it's also important to be clear about what techniques you're going to use, for how long and in what order. Avoid the temptation to jump around from technique to technique whenever you get bored - that's just a more sophisticated form of distraction, the mind's way of wriggling out of having to settle down and meditate properly. But if you find several techniques appealing and would like to practise them every day, structuring your sits in this way can be a great way to do that.

All that being said, there are really no rules! Experiment, play, try things out and see what works for you. Sooner or later you'll find something that clicks, at least for the time being; take it, run with it and see where the path leads. You won't know until you try...