Friday night – not even 10 minutes of mantra meditation. Exhausted. Drowsy.
Saturday morning, an hour: 40 minutes of mantra followed by 20 minutes of mindfulness of breath. Not enough sleep. Racing thoughts, but also quite a few moments of total silence. Hard work. A lot of nonsensical thoughts created by the tired mind. No point trying to stop them. I accepted them. Being aware of my body helped a lot.
I’m a lousy meditator. But even I managed to learn a few useful things along the way. One of them is the importance of the mindfulness of the body. When I meditate I try not to lose my physical form out of sight of my awareness. I find comfort and peace in being mindful of my body. Not sure why? Perhaps because there are no thoughts in my limbs?
No matter how much stress and worry surrounds me, at the end of the day, my body gets tired and falls asleep, gets hungry and feed itself. A UFO could land in my front garden and my body would still crave sweets after a meal. An A-bomb could explode on the horizon and I would still have to scratch my itching nose.
I can’t quite grasp it yet… but there is a wisdom in the body, in bones, blood, and skin. The same wisdom that can be found in rocks, trees, animals and the Moon. The glorious patience and indifference of nature.
Bad At Being Still 
Hi! I love reading your blog. You’re a much more experienced meditator than me, and reading your posts has helped me view my meditative experiences more effectively.
I did want to ask you; I do mindfulness meditation and cultivating loving kindness meditation, but I see you use mantra. What do you find to be the benefits of it, and how would I go about learning to practice mantra? Thank you!
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Hi, thank you. I feel that mantra meditation is just easier than mindfulness of breathing. I find that the more tangible the object of meditation the easier it is to maintain mindfulness (easy: mantra, counting out-breaths; hard: mindfulness of body/breath; very hard: choiceless awareness, like in zazen). Few reasons for doing mantra practice:
By practicing mantra I practice focus – which is a very necessary skill in many other forms of meditation (as well as in life…).
I use mantra to calm my mind before proceeding to mindfulness of breathing meditation. So I combine those two in one sitting.
I also do buddho meditation, thinking “bu” on in-breaths, “do” on out-breaths, gently, slowly. Buddho is a reminder of the Buddha. So I don’t really care much about achieving focus here. I’m just remembering that liberation/knowledge/relief is possible. Buddho means “knowing”. This is a very joyful and heartwarming practice.
Lastly, using mantra in accordance with transcendental meditation technique gave me the most intense experiences of bliss ever. I use mantra hiring. I will write about this method more very soon pointing out to some really good and free sources of information about the practice.
I hope this helps. Mantra practice is not that hard to grasp or to perform. Yes, it is extremely difficult to be good at it, but there are plenty of resources online that will provide you with all the instructions you need to start your journey. Please just try out multiple methods.
I hope that my answer was not entirely disappointing. Plase, let me know if you need anything else. All the best!
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