Calm

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A couple of weeks have passed, and you’ve meditated nearly every day, extending your initial ten minutes now to fifteen. Several times, your breath counting has reached ten and back to one without it feeling as though you have been hijacked by your own thoughts. To your initial surprise, you have discovered that if you don’t take the bait, your thoughts, emotions, or feelings will just dissolve. You note them, ignore them, and they’re gone. For a moment or two, anyway.

The counting, even though it is inward and silent, is starting to feel like an attempt to drown out your thoughts. You can’t command them to stop coming, but equally, you don’t have to invite them to share your sitting time by keeping them company. You’ve finished your paperback meditation book now, and you’ve read about moving on from breath counting to just following your breath. Of course, breaths don’t truly come in tens; they are a continuous and unchanging part of your embodied practice. Just feel them.

Your breath can continue to act as a gentle anchor for your attention, even without the overhead of actually counting them. Without the counting, there seems to be more space between the breaths, too. More than once, your meditation timer has sounded the end of your sitting time sooner than you had expected. You’re not yet relating to metaphors that describe your sitting as a mighty oak in a winter storm, firm and stable; nor yet as though you sit atop a sunlit mountain with a boundless sky, your thoughts just drifting past like clouds. But you don’t find that such metaphors sound daft, either.

There comes a point when the breath is simply there, rising and falling, steady enough that your attention can rest on it without any special effort. The mind isn’t tranquil — it rarely is — but it’s no longer grasping at every passing thought. There’s a growing sense of ease; everything has loosened a little.

This is the beginning of shamatha (calm abiding, sometimes translated as tranquillity or serenity). It’s not a technique to learn, but the natural settling that happens when effort softens. You’re no longer counting breaths; you’re abiding with them. When the mind remains at ease, even for a few moments, it begins to gather itself. Awareness feels a little less scattered, a little more unified. Nothing dramatic — just a quiet coherence.

If you sit with that, without even trying to deepen it or hold onto it, you will begin to taste samādhi (concentration, or one-pointed focus), the mind resting in itself, unforced and untroubled. It’s not a goal — reach for it, and it slips away. Not even a promise — just the natural deepening that can unfold when calm abiding becomes steady. For now, it may be vaguely sensed on the horizon — that’s all. That’s enough. Sit with ease. Grow used to it. Be grateful for it.

One – Beginning Meditation

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