Meditation

Meditation, in Tibetan Buddhism, means becoming familiar with your own mind. The Tibetan word is gom, and it means little more than getting used to something. You grow used to what has been there all along and was rarely looked at. It is not a technique for acquiring something you lack.

More than calming down

Most people come to meditation because they are restless, or sleeping badly, or because life feels too fast. That is a perfectly good reason to begin, and calm really is one of the results. Sit regularly for a while and the mind does stop racing quite so readily.

Calm is not the point, though. Our tradition describes meditation as two movements that belong together. The first is shamatha, calm abiding: letting attention rest, usually on the breath, until the mind no longer darts off every few seconds. The second is vipashyana, clear seeing: using that steadier attention to look at mind itself. Where does a thought come from? Where does it go? What is it that is looking?

Without the first, the second stays theoretical. Without the second, meditation becomes a pleasant habit that changes little.

What actually happens on the cushion

In practice it is far less solemn than it sounds. You sit, back upright, eyes not quite closed, attention on the breath. Within twenty seconds you are planning tomorrow or replaying a conversation from last week. You notice, and you come back. That noticing and coming back is the practice; it is not an interruption of it.

So there is little sense in marking a session good or bad. The mind is what it is that day. Ten minutes daily does more than an hour once a month.

Meditation rarely stands on its own here either. It rests on the four thoughts that turn the mind, and it is carried by the preliminary practices of the Ngöndro: refuge, purification, offering, guru yoga. In the Dzogchen lineage that same practice eventually leads to recognising the nature of mind, and meditation then turns out to be something other than what we first imagined it to be.

At Rigdzin Dzogchen Ling we practise together every Saturday in Hoofddorp. Anyone who wants to learn to meditate can simply join us; no prior experience is needed.