Beginning meditators often want to establish a daily meditation practice.  In fact, I'm often asked questions about daily meditations in the same way that people ask about how to lose weight or stop smoking.  They talk about it like a habit that they're either trying to adopt or get rid of.

I might be the wrong person to ask about this, because other than breathing and going to the bathroom, I can't think of anything that I've done every day.  In fact, I'm not even positive about going to the bathroom.

Establishing a daily meditation practice can be a bit of a challenge in today's world.  We know that it would be good to find a way to relax and get rid of stress, and were told that meditation is a good way of doing that.  But often try to carve out an hour in a day — or even 20 minutes — can be more stressful than the peace that we'd get from meditating.

Most teachers give familiar recommendations about establishing a practice, like: pick the same time every day to meditate and, eventually, that'll become a habit.  Or do your meditation practice first thing in the morning. Or set aside a particular place in your house to use because that way whenever you need to see that place it will remind you to practice.

Personally, whenever I had a meditation space in my house.  It would remind me that I wasn't practicing as diligently as I thought I was supposed to. And my schedule doesn't fit the "same time" suggestion. Don't even get me started on what I need to do first thing in the morning, well before I could sit to meditate.

The idea of setting up a daily meditation practice, whether you're a beginning meditator or advanced meditator reminds me of an event that happened during a long meditation course I did about 20 years ago.

At some point, the teacher could tell that we were all struggling with our practice.  And we were trying hard to relax.  I know that sounds somewhat paradoxical and obvious now, but at the time, putting out effort to relax somehow made sense.

The teacher, a Burmese grandmother called Sayama, said something that forever changed the way I thought about a daily meditation practice.  She said, "You can't force yourself to become peaceful.  What you can do is notice when you're already experiencing some equanimity, some calmness, some peace of mind… and then come to meditation to encourage that, to support that… gently."

Trying to dramatically change your life, whether it's for meditation or losing weight, rarely has that quality of gently encouraging some existing calmness.

One of the goals of meditation is to become self-reliant, to trust yourself and your inner knowing.  I don't think this is a goal that can only be found in the future.  I think this is a goal for beginner meditators as well. And a great place to start is to take some time to gently inquire how you could find it a moment in the day, whether it's one minute or 10 minutes or even just for one breath, where you're merely encouraging gently some already-existing calmness or peace of mind.

Sometimes people tell me that they're never calm at all during the day.  This is simply not true. Distress and difficulties that we might experience — the ones that we think we need daily meditations to fix — are kind of like the objects on messy table. Trying to rearrange all the objects doesn't really get rid of the mess.  What you can do instead is put your attention on the background, on the table, on what's present all the time behind the mess, behind our unpleasant experiences. The desk is already okay, regardless of what's on it.

Or another metaphor to consider: Our mind is kind of like a cloudy sky– the clouds are merely objects passing through the sky, which is untouched by them, no matter their size or shape or quantity.

At any moment it's possible to experience that "foundation layer", the background, the sky- or the table-quality of our mind.  It's already stable and calm the merely accepts whatever arises in it. And you can do this for just one simple in and out of breath.  That's all it takes to compassionately encourage that always present peace of mind.  Clearly this is a meditation that you can do every day.

Next Post: Integrating Daily Meditaiton and Daily Life

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