MINDFULNESS MEDITATION: A PRIMER AND SOME THOUGHTS

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Among the meditative practices I’ve explored, Vipassana seems the one that is most easily seen as a principled way of exploring the structure of one’s experience and the one most easily separated from a religious or soteriological context. This is true even amongst the Buddhist meditations. For example, Zazen is fascinating but its goals seem different. It pays great attention to exactly how you should position your body but tells you little about what you should do with your mind. The idea seems to be that, since you are already enlightened, active exploration or instruction in mental technique is a hindrance, and you just need to recognize your inherent enlightenment. On the other end of the spectrum, the practices derived from the esoteric Buddhisms (like Shingon and the Tibetan schools) rely heavily on symbols and their unpacking. This is a simplistic classification and mindfulness meditation appears in the other Buddhist traditions (even if not as prominently), but it’s one that I think is roughly true.

The general principle in Vipassana is to train one’s attention through focus on a particular object and, once this is well-trained, to use it to observe the unfolding of experience. It’s effectively a systematic way of noticing experience. The breath is typically the chosen focus. As far as I can tell, this choice is semi-arbitrary but has a number of advantages. Apart from the comforting stamp of tradition, the breath is both ever-present but also changes with emotional and mental state, giving a good starting ground both for training concentration and for training mindfulness of the multiple aspects of one’s state.

So here's a sketch of how you might start off:

Sit down (on a chair, on the floor, cross-legged or not, it doesn't matter) and bring your attention to the edge of your nostrils, where your breath enters and leaves. Again, all you want is an anchor point that you can use to train your concentration and to return to when your mind starts to get swamped by thoughts. Other foci would work.

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