How to Meditate

Pema Chödrön

📚 GENRE: Health & Wellness

📃 PAGES: 184

✅ COMPLETED: April 16, 2022

🧐 RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

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Short Summary

Pema Chödrön delivers a step-by-step guide to mediation that touches on key concepts such as mindfulness, posture, focus, awareness, friendliness, and observation. 

Key Takeaways

1️⃣ Come Back — A key part of meditation is being able to focus the mind on some object, like the breath. When the mind wanders, acknowledge it and bring your focus back to the breath. Every time you do this, you are sharpening the mind. 

2️⃣ Avoid Getting Hooked — The mind can spin a lot of BS and ‘hook’ you at any time using negative thoughts, stories, and mental images. The key is to realize when this is happening, catch it, and choose to bring your focus back to the present moment. This process is how you can avoid being run over by the negative mind. 

3️⃣ Observe — Thoughts and emotions are like the weather — they come and go if you let them. Rather than allowing the mind to hook you, meditation teaches you to observe thoughts as they are and watch them pass by without getting flustered. The visual of watching thoughts float by like clouds is a good one.

Favorite Quote

"Meditation is total non-struggle with what arises. Thoughts just as they are, emotions just as they are, sights just as they are, sounds just as they are — everything just as it is without anything added."

Book Notes 📑

Preface

  • Quote (P. X): “Meditation gives us the opportunity to work with our minds when we can’t control what is happening around us. Panic, anxiety, and fear are all normal reactions to the enormous unknowing we experience in life — but through meditation we can learn to come back to our breath, our bodies, and our sensations.”
    • We can use meditation to center our mind, especially when things get chaotic. 
    • Meditation helps us to avoid getting caught up and hooked by our mind. It allows us to stay present. 

Introduction

  • Dharma — The teachings of the Buddha. 
    • If you work with your mind, you will alleviate all the suffering that seems to come from the outside.
  • Quote (P. 3): “When something is bothering you — a person is bugging you, a situation is irritating you, or physical pain is troubling you — you must work with your mind, and that is done through meditation.”
  • We all have different energies moving through our mind at all times. These energies come and go like the weather. 
    • Our internal weather is shifting and changing all the time. 
    • Pain and pleasure are part of the life experience, there’s no avoiding either of these. 
      • The key is to let these energies come and go without being hooked by them. 
      • Mediation teaches you to observe these energies without judgement. 
  • Meditation is not practiced in order to feel good all the time. That’s not the purpose. This is a common misconception. 
    • The purpose of meditation is to stay with ourselves no matter what is happening, without putting labels of good and bad, right and wrong, pure or impure on top of our experience.
      • Meditation helps us observe what is happening internally, rather than getting hooked by our mind. 
  • Five Qualities Meditation Generates
      1. Steadfastness with Ourselves
      • This is developing loyalty to ourselves. 
      • This is sitting and observing what’s happening with us, regardless of what’s going on internally. 
        • Even if you meditate and you don’t end up feeling better, it’s a good session. 
      • Observing our mind without judgement or labels
      1. Clear Awareness 
      • The ability to catch ourselves when our mind begins to go into a negative tailspin. 
      • The ability to spot negative judgements popping up in the mind. 
      • Once we catch ourselves getting negative, we’re able to reverse it.
      • The opposite would be not understanding that we’re going into a negative tailspin and then never stopping it. 
      1. Emotional Clarity 
      • When you meditate, you’re able to clearly observe emotions occurring in the mind and body.
      1. Present Moment Awareness
      • The ability to live in the moment via the breath, inner body, or task mindfulness. 
      • This is the essence of mediation. 
      1. Acceptance
      • Meditation teaches the ability to accept the present moment as it is and not resist.
      • ‘No Big Deal’ is the phrase you want to operate with, regardless of if something good or bad happened to you. 
        • This mindset tends to produce present moment acceptance. 
      • If you make a big deal out of something good that happened, it can lead to pride and arrogance.
      • If you make a big deal out of something bad that happened, it can lead to low confidence and self-esteem.
        • With anything that happens, you want to have an attitude of ‘No Big Deal.’ 

Ch. 1: Preparing for Practice and Making the Commitment

  • Regular and consistent practice is the key to meditation. 
    • Decide a daily time and location that you are going to meditate and commit to it. 
    • Start with 20 minutes and gradually increase the time. 
  • Shamantha — The practice of stabilizing the mind and training it to be present.
    • Quote (P. 21): “When you have an object of meditation that you keep coming back to you — I focus on the breath — you’re taming and soothing your mind and changing the habitual patterns where you are totally run by your thoughts and emotions.”
      • Placing you mind on an object is the backbone of shamantha practice. 
      • Focus on the breath and be aware of each breath. When your mind wanders, bring it back to the breath. 

Ch. 2: Stabilizing the Mind

  • The first step in your meditation session is to ‘check in’ with yourself. Ask yourself a few questions:
    • What am I feeling physically and/or mentally?
    • What is my mood?
    • What is the quality of my mind?
    • What kind of emotions am I currently experiencing?
    • Is your mind busy, drowsy, tired, still?
    • The idea is to just observe your mind, emotions, and sensations. Get a feel for where you’re at as you check in to the session. 

Ch. 3: The Six Points of Posture

  • Sit with a straight back. Any time you feel yourself slump, straighten up.
  • The 6 posture points to focus on: 
    1. Seat
      • Sit on a firm, flat base. 
    2. Hands
      • Rest on your thighs, palms down. 
    3. Torso 
      • Sit up straight. Think of a string at the top of your head pulling your spine up. 
    4. Eyes 
      • Keep them open or shut, your choice. 
    5. Face 
      • Relax the face.
      • Keep the mouth slightly open. 
    6. Legs
      • Crossed in front of you. 

Ch. 4: Breath

  • Quote (P. 37): “Breath practice trains us in letting go. It brings gentleness to our practice, and through the breath we are able to relax and unwind.”
    • Place your mind on your breath and/or the inner body when you meditate. 
      • Any time your mind wanders (and it will) just calmly bring your focus back to the breath. 
        • Rinse and repeat. 
      • Feel the breath. Feel it flowing. 
  • Quote (P. 38): “So when you sit, place your attention on your breath. Whenever your attention wanders, bring it back to the breath.”
    • The breath and the inner body are your anchors to the present moment. Place your attention on them to stay present and avoid getting hooked by the mind. 
  • Quote (P. 39): “As you work with the breath as your object of meditation, you will begin to feel your body and mind becoming synchronized.”
    • You synch up when you place your attention on following the breath.
    • Be aware that you’re breathing! Most of us don’t have a conscious awareness that we are even breathing. 

Ch. 5: Attitude

  • During meditation, the goal is to keep a simple attitude and “keep coming back.”
    • Always come back to the present. That’s a major goal of meditation. 
    • The mind loves to wander and loves to go off into fantasy land. The key is to keep coming back to the present moment via the breath and inner body awareness. 
  • The mind can be very dramatic and charged up. Keep bringing it back to the present. 
    • Bringing your attention back via the breath and inner body is like a bicep curl in the gym. You’re training the mind. 
    • The more you bring your awareness back and avoid going down the mind’s negative stairwell, the more you are sharpening your mind. 
  • Quote (P. 42): “The root of suffering escalates into full-blown suffering when we go on and on with our habitual emotional reactivity, when we let ourselves get carried off by our thoughts and stories.”
    • Allowing the mind to drag you is the definition of getting hooked. 
    • Meditation helps you see when the mind is hooking you, and gives you the tools to bring your focus and energy back to the present moment. 
  • Quote (P. 43): “Meditation works very directly with beginning to see what we’re doing and beginning to realize that WE HAVE A CHOICE in any moment to either return to the present or to escalate our suffering by letting our stories and thoughts take over.”
    • Mediation shows you that you have a choice. It helps you see that you’re being hooked and gives you the choice of getting out of the spiral before you get hooked too deep. 
    • Mediation gives us awareness of what the mind is doing that you might not have had before. It gives you the tools to bring your focus back to the present moment. 
  • The more you can catch the mind drifting and bring it back to the present, the more your confidence grows. 
  • Quote (P. 44): “The mind is the source of all suffering, and it is also the source of all happiness.”

Ch. 6: Unconditional Friendliness

  • When you meditate, you want to be very friendly with yourself. 
  • It’s important to refrain from criticizing yourself about HOW your practice went. 
    • A lot of people treat mediation as an exercise where you’re trying to ‘accomplish’ things. 
      • A key to meditation is just allowing things to be with no agenda. You shouldn’t judge your ‘performance’ when meditating. There’s no such thinking as a bad session. 
  • Every time you mediate, the focus should be on self-love. Be friendly with yourself. 
    • When your mind wanders, be kind to yourself and gently bring it back rather than beating yourself up about having your mind wander in the first place. 

Ch. 7: You Are Your Own Meditation Instructor

  • Quote (P. 55): “Moments like this show us that when we get too caught up in technique and trying, we lose the point of meditation completely.”
    • Don’t ‘try’ when you’re meditating. 
    • Mediation is about letting things be, accepting the present moment, and observing what’s naturally occurring internally. 
      • You should not be ‘efforting’ through it. 
  • There’s no such thing as ‘doing meditation right.’ 

Ch. 8: You Are Your Own Meditation Instructor

  • The nature of mind is to think.
    • The purpose of meditation is to train the mind to be present. The goal is not to ‘eliminate’ thoughts. That’s impossible. 
  • Our mind needs to be trained.
    • Every time your mind wanders and you bring it back to your breath or inner body awareness, you’re training it.
  • Quote (P. 62): “As you meditate, simply acknowledge your awareness of thinking by saying to yourself ‘thinking.’ Then return to the breath. The instruction is that simple.
    • Mediation Process — Mind drifts, acknowledge that you’re thinking, return your focus to the breath.
      • When you say “thinking” to yourself, it’s important to be friendly. Don’t say it with annoyance or discouragement. 

Ch. 9: You Are Your Own Meditation Instructor

  • There are three levels of distracted thought when meditating: 
    1. Totally Gone
      • You went into fantasy land and completely forgot where your were. 
    2. Kind of Gone
      • Your mind heads towards fantasy land, but you catch yourself. 
    3. Thought Witness 
      • You’re following your breath and you have thoughts. But you’re observing the thoughts and not getting drawn in by them at all. 
      • The thoughts happen in the background and you’re sticking with your object, which is the breath or inner body. 
      • Remember, you’re always going to have thoughts. The purpose of meditation is to be present, not eliminate thoughts altogether. 
  • Three Words to Help Meditation: 
    • Gentleness 
      • Be gentle with yourself when your mind wanders. 
    • Patience
      • Be patient when you meditate. Not every session will go great. 
      • Mediation is not a linear progression process. 
    • Humor 
      • Have a sense of humor with your thoughts and realize that most of them are so unnecessarily dramatic. 
  • Quote (P. 68): “Our thoughts are like the weather — they’re just passing through. In our practice, there’s no need to cling to them, no need to see them as totally solid.”
    • Let thoughts come and go. 
    • Understand that thoughts and emotions are just like the weather — temporary things that are just passing through. 

Ch. 10: Thoughts as the Object of Meditation

  • After you’ve mediated for awhile, you can play with your object of focus.
    • You can move from the breath to simply watching your thoughts without judgement and holding your focus there, if you want. 

Ch. 11: Regard all Dharmas as Dreams

  • Thoughts are not reality, and a way to think about thoughts is to consider them all as ‘dreams’. 
    • Quote (P. 74): “We make a huge deal out of our thoughts, but just like dreams, they have no real substance. They are like bubbles, or like clouds.”
    • Realize the wildness and dramatic nature of thoughts and understand that they aren’t real and are often completely exaggerated. 
  • Quote (P. 74): “Coming to terms with the intangibility of our thoughts, with their lack of reality, can liberate us from enormous suffering and anguish.”
    • Again, when you catch yourself thinking, understand that they are like dreams — nothing about them is real. 
      • This understanding helps you avoid getting hooked by a thought or fear. 

Ch. 12: Becoming Intimate With Our Emotions

  • Notice when you’re feeling emotions like fear, joy, sadness, and anger. 
    • When you notice it, try to feel it and locate it in the body. Emotions are ways reflected somewhere in the body. 
    • Make feeling the emotion in your body the focus of your meditation. 
      • Ex. Fear — You get tense. Your body constricts a bit. 
  • Just as you do with thoughts, your goal is to accept all emotions and just observe them in motion. 
    • Observe the energy and sort of watch what it’s doing.
    • Never try to resist thoughts or emotions. The goal is to accept them and observe them without judging or labeling. 

Ch. 13: The Space Within the Emotion

  • When you experience emotion, stay with it. Take a second to pause and acknowledge it and then stay present with it. 
    • When you do this, you prevent yourself from being swept away by the emotion. You stay centered. 
    • When you do this, you prevent the emotion from running you over. 

Ch. 14: Emotions as the Object of Meditation

  • Thoughts and emotions are a natural and spontaneous part of the human experience. They should never be resisted. 
    • Instead, you take them in, accept them, and observe them, realizing that they come and go like the weather. 
    • Quote (P. 87): “Emotions don’t have to be so evil and scary; they are just energy. We are the ones who ascribe the labels of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ to our emotions.”

Ch. 15: Getting Our Hands Dirty

  • Emotion is just energy moving through you. There’s no need to attach to it.
    • When we experience emotion, we usually identify with it, which is the wrong thing to do. 
    • Quote (P. 95): “We don’t have to attach so much meaning to what arises, and we also don’t have to identify with our emotions so strongly. All we need to do is allow ourselves to experience the energy — and in time it will move through you.”
  • When you meditate, you want to try to experience it. Feel it in the body.

Ch. 16: Hold the Experience

  • When you encounter emotion, stay with it and stay with the experience.

Ch. 17: Breathing With the Experience

  • Emotions — Energy we attach our thoughts and stories to. 
  • Breathe with the emotion, don’t breathe it away. 
  • Focus on your breathing AND THEN try to feel the emotional energy. 
    • Breathe the emotion into the heart. This is a good way to think of it. 

Ch. 18: Drop the Story and Find the Meaning

  • Quote (P. 107): “One of the things that makes us get so lost in our emotions is that we attach our stories to them.”
    • Attaching stories to emotion can really escalate things. 
    • Try to reduce the emotion to just the energy. Take your thoughts and stories out of it. 

Ch. 19: The Sense Perceptions

  • You can use anything as an object of shamantha meditation.
    • Breath
    • Inner Body Awareness
    • Simple Activities
    • Movement 
    • Emotions 
    • Smell
    • Sounds
    • Sights
    • Touch
    • Feeling
    • The key is always to focus on it and keep coming back every time your mind wanders away. 
      • Again, every time you catch yourself and come back, you’re training the mind. 
    • When you’re meditating on your environment (whether it be sight, sounds, smell, etc.), the idea is to observe in great detail. 
  • Quote (P. 116): “When we meditate with our sense perceptions, we interrupt the momentum of thoughts and come back to the sound, or the smell, or the feeling, or whatever sense you’ve chosen to place your attention on. If you can start to practice this way with every little thing throughout your day, you’ll find that when challenges arise, you have tools for practice.”
    • You can use anything in your environment to meditate and stay present. 
  • Activity Meditation — Chiropractors are a great example of being present and living in the moment. When a chiropractor is snapping necks every day, they have to be so precise with their hands and their movement.
    • They have to be extremely mindful of what they’re doing. If they don’t, and they snap someone’s head at the wrong angle, it could be really bad. 
      • If you watch chiropractors, you can see how careful and mindful they are with every move. It’s a good lesson in activity mindfulness. 

Ch. 20: The Interconnection of All Perceptions

  • Nothing is fixed. The mind likes to come up with assumptions that are usually wrong.

Ch. 21: Giving Up The Struggle

  • Quote (P. 141): “Meditation is total non-struggle with what arises. Thoughts just as they are, emotions just as they are, sights just as they are, sounds just as they are — everything just as it is without anything added.”
    • A big part of meditation is simply allowing thoughts, feelings, and events to be just as they are without judgement or resistance.
    • Let it be. Accept. 
  • Try to practice activity meditation as often as possible. No matter what you’re doing, focus on it completely. When the mind wanders away, bring it back. Try to do the activity perfectly, as if your life depended on it.
    • With enough practice, the idea is to eventually be present with everything at all times.
      • Ex. Listening to somebody.
      • Ex. Unloading dish washer
      • Ex. Making breakfast
      • Ex. Brushing teeth

Ch. 22: The Seven Delights

  • When difficult times come up, embrace them rather than reject them. 

Ch. 23: The Bearable Lightness of Being

  • Let go. Don’t make everything such a big deal on your mind.

Ch. 24: Beliefs

  • Let go of your beliefs about certain people or situations. Let go of your need to be right all the time. 
    • This is the mind at work. Learn to question the thoughts and beliefs you have about things.

Ch. 25: Relaxing With Groundlessness

  • Quote (P. 161): “We should realize that the essence of the practice is discovering how we misperceive reality. We actually have a misperception of reality. And what we’re doing through meditation is training in being able to perceive reality correctly.”
  • Enlightenment — Perceiving reality with an open, unfixated mind, even in the most difficult circumstances.

Ch. 26: Create a Series of Practitioners

  • Try to practice with others. 

Ch. 27: Cultivate a Sense of Wonder

  • Be curious. Realize that everyone’s assumptions are based on their background, upbringing, personal experiences, and more. 
    • Be open to learning and challenging your own assumptions. 

Ch. 28: The Way of Bodhisattva

  • Quote (P. 174): “We must change our whole view about pain and difficulty and realize that pain is a prime time for spiritual practice. It is prime time because at that moment, you can either harden into an old pattern or you can soften and do something different.”
    • When difficult times come up, it’s important to accept what’s happening and let go. Meditation helps you do that. 
  • Quote (P. 175): “We find love in ourselves. This is the point. Love is not ‘out there’; it’s not in a relationship, and it’s not in having the ‘right’ relationship. It’s not our career or our job or our family or our spiritual path.”
    • Love starts with you! It starts on the inside. Love is not dependent on outside factors and you don’t ‘need’ any external things to be happy and feel love. 
      • So many people try to achieve things and ‘get things’ in order to be happy. That’s not how it works. Love and happiness start with you.