(4) A COMFORTABLE POSITION

A comfortable posture is important so that there is no undue muscular tension. Some methods call for a sit- ting position. A few practitioners use the cross-legged "lotus" position of the Yogi. If you are lying down, there is a tendency to fall asleep. As we have noted previously, the various postures of kneeling, swaying, or sitting in a cross-legged position are believed to have evolved to prevent falling asleep. You should be comfortable and relaxed....

1. Sit quietly in a comfortable position.
2. Close your eyes.
3. Deeply relax all your muscles, beginning at your feet and progressing up to your face. Keep them relaxed.
4. Breathe through your nose. Become aware of your breathing. As you breathe out, say the word, "ONE," silently to yourself. For example, breathe IN...OUT. "ONE"; IN...OUT, "ONE"; etc. Breathe easily and naturally.
5. Continue for 10 to 20 minutes. You may open your eyes to check the time, but do not use an alarm. When you finish, sit quietly for several minutes, at first with your eyes closed and later with your eyes opened. Do not stand up for a few minutes.
6. Do not worry about whether you are successful in achieving a deep level of relaxation. Maintain a passive attitude and permit relaxation to occur at its own pace. When distracting thoughts occur, try to ignore them by not dwelling upon them and return to repeating "ONE." With practice, the response should come with little effort. Practice the technique once or twice daily, but not within two hours after any meal, since the digestive processes seem to interfere with the elicitation of the Relaxation Response.(17)

Practicing the technique of meditation need not be limited to sitting positions during fixed periods of the day. One may breathe deeply, focus the mind, and relax oneself whenever one feels stress - say, just before an athletic contest, as many athletes do - or when one recognizes the onset of a negative self-comparison. When, while walking the dog or driving to work or trying to sleep, a negative self-comparison comes into your mind - "what an immoral louse I am," or "I just can't do anything right" - then you may turn off the comparing mode and turn on the experiencing mode as follows: Breathe in with your diaphragm so that your midsection inflates deeply and slowly, and then deflate slowly; then continue to repeat the cycle. At the same time focus your attention on your breathing, or on a leaf, or on some other unemotional stimulus, perhaps saying to yourself, "Don't criticize" or "I don't need to compare." Soon you may find yourself smiling - just as I now am smiling as I am breathing in accord with the instructions I've just written. (It is difficult to believe how powerful and exciting such breathing is until you have taught yourself to do it. I hope someday to write a humorous piece entitled "Confessions of a sensual breather").

It is helpful to know what not to expect of meditation. One will not quickly (if ever) learn to produce a state of mind in which thought seems to stop, and in which perception focuses down to a single unchanging point for prolonged lengths of time. If you try for that and fail to accomplish it, meditation may thereby be discredited with you. This is what I call the shattered-window fallacy, that as soon as a stray thought crosses the mind the meditation is "broken." Not at all true! Even the most experienced meditators find errant and unwanted thoughts breaking in from time to time. One must learn how to deal with these thoughts in such manner that they do not disturb the meditation; gently inspecting them, and then putting them aside and perhaps saying to oneself "I'll deal with that later," is one effective way.

Another misconception about meditation is that the meditator should fall into a trance. Not so. As a famous Chinese Buddhist put it:

"There is...a class of foolish people who sit quietly and try to keep their minds blank; they refrain from thinking of anything and then call themselves 'great.' Concerning this heretical view, I have no patience to speak.... When we use the mind we can consider every- thing;"(18)

What Meditation Does

Exactly what happens to a person while meditating is beyond general description, and varies from person to person. We can say, however, that in meditation of all sorts one does not think in normal Western everyday ways. Perhaps the basic difference is that one ceases to make comparisons between one's actual and benchmark- hypothetical situations. In this manner, the source of sadness is removed during meditation. Another difference is that one ceases to strive but relaxes instead, which leads to pleasant physical sensations incompatible with sadness. Furthermore, meditation often leads to a radically altered perspective, for example a cosmic rather than an individual perspective. Within such a cosmic perspective the contemporary events which are the grist for the mill of self-comparisons appear insignificant and unworthy of attention; this works against making negative self-comparisons.

The mechanism that leads to the state of meditation is a shift from the active flight-or-fight survival mode of thought in which one classifies and evaluates and makes comparisons, to the passive experiential state in which one simply takes in sensory experiences without classifying or evaluating or comparing them (see page 000 above). In the striving mode one abstracts a limited set of elements from the sensory input, using various already-established intellectual patterns; these abstracted inputs are the materials which one compares, and which may lead to negative self-comparisons. In contrast, in meditation one makes oneself aware either of all stimuli or of just a single element. The latter is the "one-pointed mind" of Zen in which, even outside of meditation proper, the person is aware - but fully aware - of the sensory experience, and is not "intellectualizing." When I eat I eat, and when I sit I just sit, Zen Buddhists say.