Devote more time and effort to your practice

“…The first level is called samatha-bhāvanā, the meditation for peace of mind, for calm, for tranquility, for stillness–just knowing without any thinking. When the mind enters that stage, it will experience peace and happiness that is greater than any kind of happiness.

Once you have experienced this, you know this is the thing that you will want to have for as long as possible. So you will have more chanda, viriya, citta, vimaṁsā. You will have more liking of the meditation practice. You will want to devote more time and effort to your practice and will be single-minded in your meditation.

You don’t want to go do other things and you will use your mind to analyze your practice so that you can improve and move forward. Once you have accomplished the first level, your mind enters into jhāna, to upekkhā, to merely know without having any thoughts. What you want to do is to leave it alone for as long as possible.

Don’t force your mind to think; even if you want to develop insight or wisdom, this is not the time to do it. You want to wait for the mind to withdraw from that state first, wait patiently until the mind starts to be aware of the body and the surroundings.

Then if you want to develop insight or wisdom, you can do that. But usually when you first start, you want to maintain your mindfulness. You want to be more proficient and more adept with the meditation for calm first. You want to do it in order to enter into calm, into jhāna, any time you want.

If you come out of jhāna and start to think, you might think that you are developing insight. Your mind may be misled to think about other things. Instead of developing insight (paññā/wisdom), you will actually start to agitate your mind.

So if you cannot control your thoughts yet, try to stop them first, as you come out of your jhāna or out of your samādhi. You should continue developing your mindfulness, keep repeating the mantra, or keep watching your body activities. Like when you get up and you want to practice walking meditation, you can concentrate on walking, using the body as your object of concentration.

In the case of walking, you should watch your feet. When you walk on your left foot, just know that you are walking on your left foot. When you walk on your right foot, just know that you are walking on your right foot. Just go left and right, left and right, watching as you walk.

The reason why you have to walk is to change your body position because if you sit for a long time, your body can get numb and can be painful and uncomfortable. So you want to relieve that discomfort by walking. After a while when you become tired of walking, then you can come back and sit again if you don’t have anything else to do.

Try to sit as much as you can until you know how to enter into jhāna. You should be able to enter into jhāna quickly, in five or ten minutes at the most. Once you are proficient or adept in your meditation for jhāna, then you can go on to the next step: meditating for insight…”

By Ajaan Suchart Abhijāto