Exhale

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So, interest aroused, you have put the cart before the horse and ordered both an inexpensive paperback meditation primer (such as Steve Hagen’s Meditation Now or Never) and a zafu (a circular cushion on which you propose to sit), which you think rather expensive for what it is. The delivery driver throws them down at your door without bothering to ring the bell and drives off at speed, leaving large tyre tracks in your gravelled drive. Why do they do that?

Full of enthusiasm and impatient to achieve enlightenment, preferably before the end of the month (that’s New Year resolutions for you), you take your cushion, skim-read the first two chapters of the book and sneak off to a quiet part of the house, mainly because you feel like a complete twit, trying to sit two inches off the floor with your legs crossed in a daft way considering your age and general fitness.

Undeterred (well, until you try a full Lotus position – that’s a non-starter), you manage a reasonable Burmese, and you’re ‘sitting’. However, your initial reservation about feeling like a twit is immediately validated, and you hope very much that no one in the household comes in and sees you there. You’d feel the same about sharing sitting on the loo. You could have gone to that first session of the ‘new eight-week course’ run by the local Buddhist centre, but you baulked at the price, and you tell yourself that you could always go next week.

Anyway, you feel that the immediate moment is inopportune, so you go shopping instead. Later, you return to that cushion and sit down. You fail to find the knack (which is easily acquired, but there’s no one to show you) of perching right on the edge of the cushion, to allow your hip joints to articulate so that your knees touch the floor without discomfort. So you sit awkwardly and recall those basic meditation instructions. It doesn’t matter which book you buy, or which course you attend; the basic Zazen instructions haven’t changed much since Eihei Dōgen’s snappily titled Fukanzazengi (thirteenth century). Everyone rewrites them, but they’re still the same familiar paragraphs from the universal “How to Meditate” template.

You feel the need for some small, token ceremony to get things started. You’ve found a free Meditation Timer app to download, set it to ten minutes and off you go. The ‘bell’ is far too loud. Someone might burst in at any moment, ask what you’re doing sitting on the floor, and whether you want a coffee. So, slightly irritated that your composure has already been dented by the loudness of the bell, but otherwise unmolested, you decide to close your eyes. The book said keep them half open, but from where you are sitting, your gaze (and attention) is immediately drawn to the dust on your skirting boards, and there’s something on the floor, under the telly, and it’s all you can do not to get up and investigate. So you close your eyes and take a purposeful breath, trying to feel anything that isn’t the ordinary sensation of breathing. Faced with failure, you exhale with a sigh and silently count ‘One’.

A second breath comes, but you feel (self-consciously) that you’re trying to control your breathing, to make it deep, significant and well, mindful. The book said not to do that, but just focus on the natural in-breath and out-breath, noticing the bodily sensations. You exhale and silently count ‘Two’.

You begin to feel a little more settled. Breaths come, and you exhale, ‘Three’, ‘Four’, ‘Five’. Then you notice that you’re actually thinking about something you forgot when you went shopping, and you’re telling yourself off because now you’ll have to go out again. But you noticed. And you let the thought go as you exhale, the out-breath carrying the unwanted distraction with it, and you return to the sensation of the next in-breath.

You noticed. That’s practice, and the body has always known what to do.

One – Beginning Meditation

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