Tan, Chade-Meng - Search Inside Yourself - The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)

It is the same with sustaining a mindfulness practice. You probably need some discipline in the beginning, but after a few months, you may notice dramatic changes in quality of life. You become happier, calmer, more emotionally resilient, more energetic, and people like you more because your positivity emanates onto them. You feel great about yourself. And again, once you reach that point, it is so compelling, you just cannot not practice anymore. Yes, even a seasoned meditator needs to cajole herself onto the cushion every now and then, but it becomes fairly easy and habitual.

So how do you sustain your practice up to the point it becomes so compelling that it is self-sustaining? We have three suggestions:

1. Have a buddy: We learned this from Norman Fischer, whom we jokingly call the Zen abbot of Google. Once again, we use the gym analogy. Going to the gym alone is hard, but if you have a gym buddy with whom you commit to going, you are much more likely to go regularly. This is partly because you have company and partly because this arrangement helps you encourage each other and hold each other accountable (what I jokingly call mutual harassment).

We suggest finding a mindfulness buddy and committing to a fifteen-minute conversation every week, covering at least these two topics:

• How am I doing with my commitment to my practice?

• What has arisen in my life that relates to my practice?

We also suggest ending the conversation with the question, how did this conversation go? We instituted this in Search Inside Yourself and found it very effective.

2. Do less than you can: This lesson came from Mingyur Rinpoche. The idea is to do less formal practice than you are capable of. For example, if you can sit in mindfulness for five minutes before it feels like a chore, then do not sit for five minutes—just do three or four minutes, perhaps a few times a day. The reason is to keep the practice from becoming a burden. If mindfulness practice feels like a chore, it’s not sustainable. Yvonne Ginsberg likes to say, “Meditation is an indulgence.” I think her insight beautifully captures the core of Mingyur’s idea.

Do not sit for so long that it becomes burdensome. Sit often, for short periods, and your mindfulness practice may soon feel like an indulgence.

3. Take one breath a day: I may be the laziest mindfulness instructor in the world because I tell my students all they need to commit to is one mindful breath a day. Just one. Breathe in and breathe out mindfully, and your commitment for the day is fulfilled; everything else is a bonus.

There are two reasons why one breath is important. The first is momentum. If you commit to one breath a day, you can easily fulfill this commitment and can then preserve the momentum of your practice. Later, when you feel ready for more, you can pick it back up easily. The second reason is creating the intention to meditate is itself a meditation.

This practice encourages you to generate an intention to do something kind and beneficial to yourself daily, and over time, that self-directed kindness becomes a valuable mental habit. When self-directed kindness is strong, mindfulness becomes easier.

Remember, one breath a day for the rest of your life. That is all I ask.

Lightness and Joy in Meditation

When I was new to meditation, I struggled with the simplest and silliest of all problems: I could not breathe. I mean, I could take in air and all during the normal course of the day, but when I tried consciously bringing my attention to my breath, I could not breathe properly. I was trying too hard.

One day, I decided I was going to stop trying hard. I was just going to sit, smile, and take note of my body while I sat, that was all. After just a few minutes of doing that, I fell into the state where I became alert and relaxed at the same time. And then I caught myself breathing normally. That was the first time I was able to pay attention to my breath and breathe properly at the same time. Only by not trying did I finally succeed. If I were a TV character, I would have looked up at the sky at that moment and sarcastically said, “Very funny.”

In a humorous way, meditation is like trying to fall asleep. The more relaxed you are, the less you are fixated on the goal, the easier it becomes, and the better the outcome. The reason for this is that meditation and falling asleep have one important feature in common: they both rely on letting go.

The better you are at letting go, the better you are at both meditating and falling asleep. That is why many meditation teachers tell their students to have no expectations about their practice, because being fixated on outcomes interferes with the letting-go mind. I think this approach is correct, but it creates a vexing problem: if people have no expectation of benefits, why would they want to practice at all?

The best solution I know was suggested by Alan Wallace: “Have expectations before meditation, but have no expectation during meditation.” 5Solved. Simple, elegant solutions like this one warm the hearts of little old engineers like me.

Having a relaxed mind is very useful in meditation. Relaxation is the foundation of deep concentration. When the mind is relaxed, it becomes more calm and stable. These qualities in turn strengthen relaxation, thus forming a virtuous cycle. Paradoxically, deep concentration is built upon relaxation.

A similar mechanism works in the practice of mindfulness. I found lightness to be highly conducive to mindfulness. Lightness gives rise to ease of mind. When the mind is at ease, it becomes more open, perceptive, and nonjudgmental. These qualities deepen mindfulness, which in turn strengthens lightness and ease, thus forming a virtuous cycle of deepening mindfulness.

This insight suggests that a really good way to practice mindfulness is using joy as an object of meditation,especially the type of joy with a gentle quality that doesn’t overwhelm the senses. For example, taking a nice walk, holding hands with a loved one, enjoying a good meal, carrying a sleeping baby, or sitting with your child while she is reading a good book are great opportunities to practice mindfulness by bringing full moment-to-moment attention to the joyful experience, to the mind, and to the body. I call it Joyful Mindfulness.

The first effect of bringing mindfulness to joyful experiences is they become even more enjoyable, simply because you are more present to enjoy them—extra enjoyment at no additional cost. More importantly, I found this mindfulness gain to be generalizable. That means if you practice and strengthen mindfulness during joyful experiences, that gain in mindfulness infuses other experiences as well, so you end up with stronger mindfulness in neutral and unpleasant experiences too. (Having fun as a meditation, what a great deal!)

Having said that, it is important to note that Joyful Mindfulness is best practiced as a complement to, not a replacement for, formal sitting practice. Formal practice requires you to bring mindfulness to neutral experiences like your breath, and because attention naturally gravitates away from neutral experiences, that mindfulness gain is a lot more generalizable. So comparing formal sitting to Joyful Mindfulness, you find that the former gives you better mindfulness gain, but unfortunately, requires discipline, and discipline is a scarce resource. In contrast, Joyful Mindfulness gives you less mindfulness gain but is far more sustainable. Plus, it is fun, and nobody can argue with fun—I know I can’t. Hence, you can think of Joyful Mindfulness as the first gear of a car: it can easily move the car, but if you only use the first gear, you cannot go fast. In contrast, think of formal sitting as the higher gears: it is harder to get a stationary car to move using those gears, but they are the ones that get you good speed and mileage.