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MEDITATION
What is True Mindfulness?
But what he began to realize is that for most people it was just chatter, chatter, chatter constantly, and there was
no openness or stillness. We were practicing with our worries and concerns about our jobs and relationships and
everything. And the average experience was of no openness at all, just a lot of noise. So we sat down and rested our
minds in talking to ourselves... The instruction wasn't doing what it set out to do. It was actually a more advanced
instruction than we were capable of following.
So Rinpoche drew from the tradition and gave us more of a form than just this "Open your mind and let it rest there."
He said, "Relate to the breath; go out with the outbreath." He gave us an object of meditation.
It's very significant that it's only the outbreath that we attend to. This isn't easy to say that we don't breathe in
and out. We do, of course. But what it's like saying is more like: get the sense of emphasizing the outwardness,
because that's as close as you can come to just resting your mind in its natural state, since the breath naturally
goes out and dissolves into space.
I was reading an article recently on meditation which he had written in the early days, which is kind of transitional
instruction. In it, he told us to start with attending to breathing in and out, but he said, "The key thing here is,
try not to watch the breath, but try feeling it go in and out, so you feel one with the breath. Just see if from the
beginning you can minimize that sense of heavy-duty watching it, and just feel the breath going in and out." And then
he said, "Then start to emphasize the outwardness and the space that the breath goes into, and emphasize that more and more. And then just see if you can let that sense of outwardness and space begin to pervade the whole practice more and more."
Once I was describing this technique to a friend of mine in another Buddhist tradition which emphasizes a strong
focus on mindfulness of the breath, and I said, "We emphasize the outbreath, and then we're told to just wait. As the
breath is coming in we are told to just wait, and then go out again, and then wait again and then go out again." She
said, "No, that's impossible." And I said, "Why?" And she said, "Well because there's a whole part of meditation
there where you don't have an object— there's nothing to concentrate on, there's a whole part there where the
point is nothing to be mindful of." And then I realized that was the point. I had never before realized so clearly
that that was actually the point.
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