Meditation is the way to achieve letting go. In Meditation one lets go of the complex world outside in order to reach the serene world inside. In all types of mysticism and in many traditions, this is known as the path to the pure and powerful mind. The experience of this pure mind, released from the world, is very wonderful and blissful.
During this meditation retreat there will be some hard work at the beginining, but be willing to bear that hard work knowing that it will lead you to experience some very beautiful and meaningful states. They will be well worth the effort! it is a law of nature that without effort one does not make progress. whether one is a layperson or a monk, without effort one get nowhere, in meditation or in anything.
Effort alone, through, is not sufficient. The effort need to be skillful. This means directing your energy just at the right places and sustaining it there until its task is completed. Skillful effort neither hinders nor disturbs you, instead it produces the beautiful peace of deep meditation.
In order to know where your effort should be directed, you must have a clear understanding of the Intention of meditation. The Intention of this meditation is the beautiful silence, stillness and clarity of mind. if you can understand that intention then the place to apply your effort, the means to moving toward the intention become very clear.
The effort is directed to letting go, to developing a mind that inclines to abandoning. One of the many simple but profound statement of the lord Buddha is that" a meditator whose mind in clines to abandoning, easily achieves Smadhi.
Another stage of meditation, is silent awareness of the present moment. You may spend the majority of your time just developing these two stages because if you can get this far then you have gone a long way indeed in your meditation. in that silent awareness of "Just now"you will experience much peace, joy and consequent wisdom.
If you want to go further, then instead of being silently aware of whatever come into the mind, you choose silent present moment awareness of one thing. That one thing can be the experince of breathing, the idea of loving and kindness.
It often happens that when we start breath meditation when our mind is still jumping around between past or future, and when awareness is being drowned by the inner commentary. with no preparation we find breath meditation so difficult, give up because we did not start at the right place. We did not perform the preparatory work before taking up the breath as a focus of our attention.
when you focus on the breath, you focus on the experience of the breath happening now. You experience "that which tells you what the breath is doing". When you know the breath going in and the breath going out, for say one hundred breaths in a row, not missing one, then you have achieved what i call the third stage of this meditation, sustained attention on the breath.
"Do absolutely nothing and see how smooth and beautiful and timeless the breath can appear.
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