Awakening the Buddha Within _ Eight Steps to Enlightenment - Lama Surya Das [162]
If your mind wanders, if you hear a sound, bring your mind back to the raisin. Don’t look around. Place your attention back on chewing the raisin. Point your mind, direct your attention, focus your awareness intently, intensely—like a light beam, like a laser. One-pointedly, focus on the raisin, on the place where your teeth make contact with the raisin; feel it directly. No need to understand why or how or what is the meaning of raisins, of meditation or life for that matter. Just chew the raisin twenty or even one hundred times if possible, concentrating totally. Relax and enjoy the experience. Get the most out of it, as if this is the only food you’re going to have all day. Chew it totally, appreciating and absorbing everything about it. Through total attention, extract the essence of every aspect of it—the taste, texture and so on. Just keep chewing the raisin. Swallow it, and then just rest in the afterglow of this delicious experience.
Now slowly take the second raisin from your right hand with your left and bring it up toward your mouth. Look at it. Smell it. Feel it. Examine it. Resist the impulse to rush it into your mouth. Simply notice those impulses. Then put it in your mouth and start chewing it. If it were a mouthful of macrobiotic brown rice, we would chew it a hundred times. We see how long we can make it last. Simply pay attention to chewing the raisin while letting go of everything else. This stabilizes and unifies our mind. Just doing what we are doing, for a change. One hundred percent. Just sitting, and just eating. How delightful! How delicious.
Now you take the third raisin and do your own meditation on it. A new raisin, a new experience. How is it different from the other two? Does it look the same? Does it taste the same? Maybe it’s sweeter. Maybe less startling. Where did your attention go? Bring it back. Concentrate.
This is a pragmatic example of meditation practice. We master meditative awareness by doing it again and again. It’s always different, it’s always fresh, it always develops and reveals new discoveries. We are exercising the muscles of awareness, directing our attention to precisely what we are doing.
When we chew our raisin, we are learning to thoroughly and meticulously chew over whatever task we happen to have at hand. In this way we learn to mingle mindfulness and concentrated awareness with daily life.
INTEGRATING THESE EXERCISES
INTO YOUR PRACTICE
The dictionary defines practice as “doing or performing something repeatedly in order to acquire or polish a skill.” I think it’s really important that we remind ourselves regularly that meditation practice is just that—something that we repeatedly do in order to perfect our meditational skills. The more we practice, the more we cultivate our innate powers. As we continue to hone our natural capacity to concentrate, the deeper and stronger our powers of concentration become.
In your own practice, you may find as I have that you can use these six concentration exercises to round out your meditation sessions. For example, perhaps you plan to meditate for an hour. For the first ten minutes, you simply relax and practice breath counting; then you move on to the awareness of breathing. But after half an hour, you feel too stiff and dull to continue; perhaps you are even dozing. Instead of giving up on meditation, you can incorporate some minutes of standing meditation or walking meditation into your practice at this point. This can refresh you, so you can then return to sitting meditation. When we undertake silent intensive meditation retreats, the day is typically broken up into forty-five minute periods of sitting, walking, sitting—with a little chanting, and then a break—plus instruction once or twice a day. In this