3. General Meditation Tips

The following points apply to all meditations discussed in this manual.

 

Meditation posture

 

Sitting posture is crucial for meditation training. In some of the sutta sequences of successive mind qualities, what directly precedes samadhi is sukha, translated as “pleasure,” “happiness,” or “bliss.”[1] The opposite of sukha is dukkha—pain, meaning pain is not at all conducive to samadhi. Pain is bad for samadhi.

 

Generally, the posture should be well-grounded, stable, and comfortable, minimizing pain. It should maximize the duration you can sit without physical discomfort. Full lotus, half lotus, Burmese, seiza, chair sitting . . . you need to find what works best for you. The more grounded, the better—so, the cross-legged postures are preferable to the kneeling ones, and the kneeling ones are preferable to sitting on a chair—as long as the preferable ones are not too uncomfortable.

 

The posture would ideally allow you to sit still without any movements for the whole meditation session. Of course, if you need to slightly adjust the posture, such as straightening your back, that’s fine. However, you should try to minimize any movements during the meditation. Also, the posture should allow you to be relaxed when meditating, not tense. Always try to be relaxed when meditating.

 

 

Combining postures

 

At a certain point in my practice, I wanted to increase the total time spent in meditation by combining two or even three different postures, as there is usually a limit to how long you can sit in a given posture per day. After some time, however, I realized my samadhi was not better, despite meditating longer. I don’t find combining postures to increase the total time in meditation an effective way to deepen samadhi.

 

I suppose it’s because the mind and body get used to building samadhi in a given posture, and when you change that posture, it takes some time to readjust. Changing posture slightly interrupts the momentum of the samadhi practice. The overall result, at least from my experience, is that any extra samadhi gained from the additional meditation time is not significant, and it may even have a negative effect. For example, meditating four hours a day in one posture may yield similar or even better results in terms of samadhi than meditating four hours in that posture plus two extra hours in another posture.

 

Still, valuing more time spent in meditation, regardless of its impact on samadhi, is also a legitimate approach. It depends on your priorities. You can experiment and stick to whatever benefits you more.

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The “Lazy Lotus” posture

 

In the introduction, I promised to share the game-changing “trick” that helped me attain the cessation of perception and feeling. Given how crucial meditation posture is, it’s no coincidence that the “trick” ended up in this section. Here is the story:

 

In July 2022, it had already been about three years since I managed to attain all four jhanas and four formless attainments. My primary meditation practice was being absorbed in the base of neither perception nor non-perception. Unfortunately, I’ve never been the most physically flexible guy. I’ve always struggled with discomfort in the classical sitting meditation postures. I mainly used the Burmese one. Sometimes, it was my knee, but usually it was something around my hip joint that caused the trouble. It was limiting the duration I was able to meditate without pain.

 

Now, you may think that there should be no perception of the body or pain in the absorption of formless attainments. So, how can I feel pain in these states? Well, it’s simple—the painlessness of absorption is not limitless. If you hit someone in completely pure full absorption with a baseball bat, the meditator will experience pain, believe me. If you sit long enough, pain will creep in and “pierce” the absorption. This is what my legs were doing to my meditation.

 

One lucky day, the pain was coming even earlier than usual. I recalled one monk meditating in this funny posture, where he just sat on the floor with his legs stretched out in front of him and leaned back against a wall. Let’s call it the Lazy Lotus posture. I was struggling enough with my Burmese posture to try it out.

 

After a relatively short time, my meditation went much better. Going back to the features of an optimal posture, this posture has it all for me: it’s very well-grounded and stable, and all the pressure on my legs is gone. What a relief. Less pain, deeper samadhi. Easy solution.

 

Believe it or not, I attained the cessation of perception and feeling about three or four days later. It’s hard to quantify, but if I could say a number, I would say the “ceiling” of how far I could get in meditation moved about 30–40% higher merely because I could meditate longer without physical discomfort. That was why I was suddenly able to break through into the cessation. Besides the posture change and dealing with new levels of meditation depth, I hadn’t done anything differently.

 

I believe that had I sat like that from the beginning, I would have made it to the cessation not long after getting into the neither perception nor non-perception. I have been meditating in this posture ever since.

 

I’m not saying it’s the best posture for everyone. But if you’re one of those struggling with the classical postures due to pain, and I believe there are many people with that problem, I recommend trying it out. Some people may laugh when they see you. You may be shy to sit like that during group meditation sessions (but you don’t need those to attain jhana anyway). It’s not a visually impressive meditation posture, to be sure. But meditation is not figure skating. It doesn’t need to look good. It needs to be good for your mind. You need the most effective posture for the mind training.

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Don’t let what others think limit the results of all the time and effort you put into the practice. Again, I’m not claiming it’s a universally better posture than the others. It’s individual. But I think it may be helpful for many meditators who’ve never even considered sitting like that just because “that’s not how it’s done.” For me, it was the last missing ingredient for completing the ninefold sequence of meditative attainments.

 

If you try this posture, sit on something soft to maximize the time you can sit without pain. You will also need something (a folded blanket, for instance) between your back and whatever you lean against. After some time, you would probably feel pressure on the knees and heels, so you can also put something under the knees and the Achilles tendon in a way that your knees are slightly bent and the weight of your legs is not resting on the heels. Make yourself comfortable. You can adjust the set-up to relieve pain if it arises.

 

 

Where to meditate

 

On group meditation retreats, people usually meditate together in a meditation hall. The benefits of it can be the team spirit and that it motivates quiet sitting during the whole meditation session as you don’t want to disturb others. Besides these two, I don’t see any significant benefit. The other meditators will sometimes disturb you, which may not be much of a problem for insight (vipassana) techniques, but for developing serenity (samatha), a quiet place is preferable.

 

So, unless you find some relevant benefit in meditating with a group, the ideal setting is meditating alone in quiet, undisturbed seclusion. You can do that by holding a solitary retreat or meditating in your single accommodation on a group retreat.

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How long to meditate

 

How long should each meditation session last? The common approach is to sit for a predefined period. I prefer a flexible duration approach. The optimal duration of a sitting session is as long as possible, within what is physically sustainable from the whole retreat perspective.

 

Why would you quit when still comfortably meditating? If the alarm goes off when you are still fine in your posture, you are quitting unnecessarily early. You may miss out on the juiciest part of the (unrealized) meditation. The best things can happen at the latest stages of the sitting.

 

On the other side, if you’re painfully struggling to make it to the end of the session, you are not gaining much, if anything, in terms of samadhi, and you’re increasing the chance that the physical discomfort will come even earlier in the following sessions. You are sinking yourself deeper into that physical discomfort swamp.

 

There comes a time in the sitting session when it becomes quite physically uncomfortable; the discomfort is not just some temporary issue—it’s caused by sitting for a long time; you have the sense it’s not going to get better, and it negatively affects the meditation. That is the optimal time to stop. You are meditating as long as you can while not overstraining yourself, keeping the physical sustainability of the practice in mind.

 

This way, the sessions can vary in duration. You don’t set an alarm, but tracking each session’s duration is useful. The daily schedule example has one-hour slots for sitting meditation. If you use this flexible approach, it can be less or more than that.

 

The downside of this flexible duration approach is that you may be indecisive about the right time to quit. Having to make that decision to stop may be a bit of a burden, but hopefully not a serious one once you get used to it.

 

You can experiment with both fixed and flexible duration approaches and choose the one that makes more sense to you.

 

 

Pre-play and re-play

 

Before every meditation session, it’s good to pre-play what you want to do during the meditation. Refresh the meditation instruction from your memory, pre-play in your mind what you want to be doing, what you don’t want to be doing, and how you’ll react to certain situations (such as the attention wandering away from the breath during mindfulness of breathing). This mental preparation helps with executing the meditation instruction in practice.

 

After every meditation session, briefly re-play it in your mind. Try to understand what happened, what went well, and what didn’t. Try to see patterns of how the mind works. For instance, what led to the mind being steadier? What led to the mind being distracted? Such patterns often go beyond the meditation session. Work with that too—a holistic approach. Try to leverage every relevant experience to enhance your practice. It’s a learning process.

 

 

Focus on executing the instruction, not on the results

 

The potential danger of meditation instructions following a progressive sequence of meditative stages is that the meditator knows what is supposed to come next. It may be distracting or lead to a tendency to mentally project the next stage instead of fully focusing on the current one. Knowing what might come next is hardly avoidable. For the jhanas, specifically, whoever pursues them has likely read their descriptions before and thus has a general idea of how they might be.

 

Being too occupied by what could come next in meditation is a risk, indeed. But risks can be managed and mitigated. The best practice is always focusing entirely on executing the instruction for the stage you’re in, to the best of your ability. It doesn’t hurt to contemplate any meditative states outside of the formal meditation. However, during the meditation sessions, one should not worry about anything other than executing the instructions. Expecting specific results is never part of the instruction.

 

The skill to focus on executing the instruction in the present moment, instead of looking back at what happened or ahead at what may happen, is part of the mind training. If the results come, they come because you have followed the instructions, not because you have fantasized about the results.

 

 

Don’t rely on your imagination and expectations about what you can or cannot do in meditation

 

The range of what is experienceable in meditation is difficult to imagine. It’s not comparable to imagining something within our usual sensory experience. The quality, depth, and potential intensity of the nine attainments are hardly imaginable without the actual experience.

 

Therefore, it’s not easy to describe from one side and to imagine from the other side how rewarding these states are. Also, the fact that something seems impossible to do in meditation does not mean it is impossible. It’s just impossible to imagine due to the lack of any experiential reference point for such altered states of consciousness.

 

The point is that it doesn’t make sense to give up just because one cannot imagine and lacks the confidence to get into those states. What you can or cannot imagine doing is no predictor of what you can actually do in meditation. The limit of how far the human mind can go regarding serenity is that the conscious mind activity completely ceases. There is no other way of finding out how far you can go than trying. Don’t give much weight to subjective expectations about what you can or cannot attain. Such expectations can easily be inaccurate. All you can do is try your best and see what happens. The potential reward is difficult to imagine, well beyond the reward of sensual pleasures.

 

 

Extraordinary events related to meditation

 

Along the path of meditation, as samadhi grows, you may encounter some unusual experiences. The range of what is experienceable is vast. There are “out-of-body” experiences, experiences of nonduality, experiences of out-of-scale bliss, experiences of as if plunging into something, intense energy bursts, perceiving as if through a magnifying glass, perceiving light, perceiving only sensations in space without perceiving the borders of the body, flashes of early childhood memories, brief “cessations,” which make the whole experience abruptly fall apart and reboot again, and the like.[2]

 

Such events can be very intriguing, rewarding, or even transformative. On the one hand, it will usually be an indicator of the practice going well (which doesn’t mean that if you don’t have such experiences, your practice is not going well). On the other hand, there is a risk of giving too much weight to it. In fact, giving too much weight to unusual experiences related to meditation is a typical source of overestimation—believing you have attained something profound while you have not. As I understand it, the extraordinary events are often nothing more than interesting by-products of samadhi.

 

In any case, in the context of developing samadhi, the extraordinary events shouldn’t affect the practice. The instructions remain the same.

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Keep your meditation techniques simple

 

A suitable meditation instruction is not necessarily overly complex. Its value lies in pointing the meditator in the direction leading to the desired destination. The key to progress is having an uncomplex, rightly directed meditation technique plus skillfully managing the training outside of meditation.

 

When you read on, you might think the formal meditation instructions are relatively few and simple. That’s how it should be. A simile comes to my mind:

 

Suppose you’re on a journey to your desired destination, but you’ve never walked the path before. You come to a square with several paths leading from it, not knowing which one to take. Someone comes to you and shows you a certain path, saying it leads to your destination. That advice and walking in the given direction are not at all complex (which doesn’t mean that getting to the destination is easy). However, at that stage of the journey, the advice is essential. Without that relatively simple advice, you might take the wrong turns and wander for a long time without reaching your goal.

 

Similarly, there are many options (paths) for what you can do in meditation, most of them not leading to the samadhi attainments. The appropriate meditation instruction doesn’t overwhelm you with minor details. It shows you the right direction. The simplicity of showing how to walk in that direction is not a deficiency; it reflects the nature of the practice leading to the goal.

 

 

Don’t overanalyze the instructions that don’t apply to you

 

A thing to keep in mind regarding the meditation instructions in this manual is that they are primarily meant for meditators in the given meditation stage. Due to the difficulty of imagining the samadhi states without the actual experience, the instructions can be less intuitive to those who have not yet reached the given stage. The instructions and descriptions of the states will resonate more once you’re in the stage they relate to.

 

 

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Key Takeaways

 

• “Pain is bad for samadhi. . . . meditation is not figure skating. It doesn’t need to look good. . . . You need the most effective posture for the mind training.”

 

• “The skill to focus on executing the instruction in the present moment, instead of looking back at what happened or ahead at what may happen, is part of the mind training. If the results come, they come because you have followed the instructions, not because you have fantasized about the results.”

 

• “ . . . it doesn’t make sense to give up just because one cannot imagine and lacks the confidence to get into those [nine meditative] states. What you can or cannot imagine doing is no predictor of what you can actually do in meditation.’’

 

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[1] The Numerical Discourses of the Buddha, sutta 10.1.

[2] This is only a list of what I’ve experienced myself. I’m sure there is more.