Sittingmeditation PDF

Sitting Meditation Step by Step:
Being in the Body, Labeling, and Opening into the Heart of Experiencing
By Ezra Bayda
I used to approach sitting, and especially retreats, with the

The Buddhist practice of idea that meditation was supposed to make me feel a
special way. Often, I just wanted to be free from anxiety.
sitting meditation As a consequence, I rarely had a clear idea of what sitting
has three aspects. was really about. Even now, when I'm no longer trying to
feel some special way from sitting, I still find it helpful
Being in the body is occasionally to reorient myself to exactly what I'm doing
the ground of practice. in my sitting practice.
Labeling our thoughts
How often have you realized, right in the middle of a
breaks our identification sitting, that you don't even know what the basic practice
with them. is? How often have you asked yourself, "What exactly am
I supposed to be doing here?"
Opening into the heart
of experience awakens us This confusion is a normal part of the practice path, which
is a good reason to review basic sitting instructions
to love and compassion. regularly. Practice can never be learned just through
reading or thinking about it. To awaken clarity based on
genuine understanding, we have to learn from our own
experience. Nonetheless, it's good to have a clear overview
of what sitting practice is, even if it is, in part, conceptual.
Meditation practice can be divided into three parts. These

three are not really separate and distinct; they are a
continuum. For the purposes of description, however, we
will look at these three aspects of sitting as if they were
separate.
The first aspect of sitting is being-in-the-body. This is the

basic ground of practice. When we first sit down to
meditate, we take a specific posture. The important point
is not which posture we take, but whether we're actually
present to the physical experience. Being-in-the-body
means we're awake, aware, present to what is actually
going on. So even though it's true certain postures are
conducive to this level of awareness, it's also true that we
can meditate on a subway, standing up or lying in bed.
Sitting Meditation Step by Step Page 2 of 4
It's useful to have a routine to bring awareness to the physical reality of the moment, especially
when we first sit down to meditate. For example, when I sit down I ask myself, "What is going
on right now?" Then I touch in with my physical state, my mental/emotional state, and the
environmental input (temperature, sound, light, and so
on). This check might only take a few seconds, but it
immediately takes me out my mental realm and
grounds me in the more concrete physical world. The The point is not to
point is not to think about the body, the emotions, or think about the body,
the environment, but to actually feel them.
the emotions,
After this quick check, I return awareness to the or the environment,
posture by telling myself: "Allow the head to float to
the top, so that the lower back can lengthen, broaden but to actually feel them.
and soften." This reminder brings me further into my
bodily experience. Throughout the sitting period,
whenever I find myself spinning off into thoughts, I
use this reminder to bring my awareness back to the
present moment. The essence of being-in-the-body is
simply to be here.
Normally, after settling into the sitting posture, I bring

awareness to the breath in a very concentrated way for
just a few minutes. I am not thinking about the breath,
but bringing awareness to the actual sensations of it
entering and leaving my body. For this brief period,
when thoughts arise I don't label them; I narrow my
awareness to focus solely on the experience of
breathing. The value of this practice is that it allows
me to settle into sitting.
But the value of this (or any other) concentrative practice - that it can shut life out - is also its
limitation. Practice is about opening to life, not about shutting it out. And even though
continuous concentration on the breath can make us feel calm and relaxed as well as focused and
centered, this is not the point of sitting practice. As much as we would like to have pleasing or
special experiences, the path of meditation is about being awake. It's about being awake to
whatever we feel. It's ultimately about learning to be with our life as it is. So although
concentration practices can certainly be helpful at times, we aspire to spend most of our sitting
time in a more wide-open awareness.
Wide-open awareness is the essence of being-in-the-body. This is where we become aware of

bodily sensations, thoughts, changing states of mind, and input from the environment. The
practice is just to be aware, to simply observe and experience whatever is happening. There is
really nothing special about this approach - it is very low key. We're attempting to see and
experience life as it arises by letting it just be there - minus our opinions and judgments. This
approach highlights the never-ending struggle between just being here and our addiction to the
comfort and security of our mental world.
So this first aspect of sitting - being-in-the-body - simple as it sounds, is actually very difficult.
Why? Because we don't want to be here. A strong part of us prefers the self-centered dream of
plans and fantasies. That's what makes this practice so difficult: the constant, unromantic, non-
exotic struggle just to be here. As we sit in wide-open awareness, however, as the body/mind
gradually settles down, we can begin to enter the silence, where passing thoughts no longer hook
us. We enter the silence not by trying to enter, but through the constant soft effort to be present,
allowing life to just be.
The second mode of sitting is labeling and experiencing.

As we sit, emotions arise. Sometimes they pass when we As emotions arise,
become aware of them. But sometimes they demand
more of our attention. When that happens, we become we can ask,
more focused in our practice. With precision we begin to “What is this?”
label our thoughts. As well, we focus on experiencing
the bodily state that is an inextricable part of an
emotional reaction.
As emotions arise, we can ask, "What is this?" The

answer to this question is never analytical. It cannot be
reached with thought, because it is not what the emotion
is about. It's what it is. So we look to our experience
itself, noticing where we feel the emotion in the body.
We notice its quality or texture. We notice its changing
faces. And we come to know, as if for the first time,
what the emotion actually feels like.
Invariably we will slip back into thinking. As long as we

are caught in thinking, we can't continue to experience
the bodily component of our emotions. In fact, the more intense the emotion, the more we will
want to believe our thoughts. So the practice is to label the thoughts over and over-to see them
clearly and to break our identification with them. That will almost always involve moving back
and forth between labeling and experiencing.
Learning to stay with - to reside in - our emotions in this way allows us to see how most of our
emotional distress is based on our conditioning, and particularly on the decisions and beliefs that
arose out of that conditioning. We come to see that these emotional reactions, which we often
fear and prefer to avoid, amount to little more that believed thoughts and strong or unpleasant
physical sensations. We can see that when we are willing to experience them with precision and
curiosity, we no longer have to fear them, or push them away. Thus our belief systems become
clarified.
The third aspect of our sitting practice is opening into the heart of experiencing. On those
occasions when we experience dense, intense or even overwhelming emotions, when we seem so
confused that we don't even know how to practice - what can we do?
When the precision of labeling thoughts is not an option, the practice is to breathe the painful
reaction into the center of the chest. Although eventually we will still need to clarify the believed
thoughts that are an inextricable part of our emotional reaction, for now we simply open to our
deepest fears and humiliations. We're pulling our swirling physical sensations, via the in-breath,
into the center of the chest, allowing the center of the chest to be a container of awareness for our
strong emotions. We're not trying to change anything. We're just learning to fully experience our
emotions. Why? Because experiencing our emotions fully will allow them to break through the
layers of self-protective armor and awaken our heart. Fully felt, our emotions will clear the path
to the deep well of love and compassion that is the essence of our being.
It is in these darker moments, when we feel overwhelmed, that we are apt to judge ourselves
most harshly. We're likely to solidify the most negative core beliefs about ourselves, seeing
ourselves as weak, as losers, as hopeless. It's at this point that we most need a sense of heart, of
kindness, of lightness, in the practice. We do this by
learning to breathe into the heartspace, thereby
undercutting the relentless self-judgment of our
deeply held beliefs. As we breathe into this space, Our willingness
piercing our armoring and awakening the heart, we
can open into a more benign awareness toward
to breathe into the heart,
ourselves and the human predicament. We can begin to stay in that space
to relate to ourselves as we might relate to a for just one more breath,
defenseless child in distress - nonjudgmentally, with
friendliness, tolerance and kindness. Our willingness shows us our strength,
to breathe into the heart, to stay in that space for just our courage to go on.
one more breath, shows us our strength, our courage
to go on.
By opening into the heart of experiencing, we can

come to understand that everything is workable. This
is one of the key points of practice. Our efforts to be-
in-the-body, and to label and experience, will
inevitably "fail" at times. We will have periods of
aspiration and effort, followed by dry spots and
apathy. Ups and downs in practice are predictable and
inevitable. That we seize these ups and downs as
opportunities to judge ourselves - as failures or as
superstars - is the problem. The countermeasure is
always to simply persevere-to attend to one more
breath, to label one more thought, to experience one
more sensation, to enter just one more time into the
heartspace. We can then experience for ourselves that
it is ultimately possible to work with everything. It may not be possible today, but it is possible.
In fact, it may take years of work in all three aspects of sitting practice for this understanding to
become real to us.
Until now I've spoken of these three modes of sitting as if they were distinct from each other. In
truth, although each mode does entail a different aspect of practice, they do have one essential
thing in common: they all require that we experience this present moment. That's what our
practice always comes down to: just being here. By continually allowing the light of awareness
to shine on the confusion and anxiety of the present moment, we break the circuitry of our
conditioning. This is the slow transformative path to freedom.

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Sitting Meditation Step by Step:

I used to approach sitting, and especially retreats, with the

Meditation practice can be divided into three parts. These

The first aspect of sitting is being-in-the-body. This is the

Normally, after settling into the sitting posture, I bring

Wide-open awareness is the essence of being-in-the-body. This is where we become aware of

The second mode of sitting is labeling and experiencing.

As emotions arise, we can ask, "What is this?" The

Invariably we will slip back into thinking. As long as we

By opening into the heart of experiencing, we can

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